Author:
Mario Brash is a reader, writer, coffee enthusiast, and huge nerd of many things. 

Jessica Leibniz tried being a normal teenager, but unlike most teenagers, she can tell time without a clock. She still wears a watch, but it comes with incriminating A.I. software. It's part of her fashion sense-if you call a mix of 80's nostalgia, geekism, and jagged hair a fashion sense. Otherwise, you have a normal, nineteen-year-old girl who delivers pizza and tacos by day and hacks cybersecurity networks by night. All the while, she turns heads, probably because she performs her job on a gravity board, which is relatively unorthodox in a future where aliens rule the planet.

The alien takeover could have ended more violently, but there's irony in how efficient and peaceful Earth has become a hundred years later. Corporations still reign supreme, but aliens lie at the top of the social ladder. Azareans they call them, overlords who've constructed a new kind of city for the modern world. The Eden: a modern megapolis.

Accustomed to life in the modern city, Jessica has learned to embrace challenge when it comes her way. Without a cause, she confides in her three friends or smacks into boredom. And when she seamlessly cracks an uncrackable corporate security algorithm, nothing makes sense. Faced with world-turning revelations, the life she's led seems trivial next to a hundred-year lie and tragedy.

Hacking the Sun

The voices whispered in her head, illusive echoes of the wind. 


They set her mind adrift and into the past. Adolescents without guidance fell under merciless criticism, often under the wrong pair of eyes. The difference between peer pressure and parents was that peers lacked the luxury of hindsight, and hindsight was never a luxury.


Thanks to a white slit between the leaves, Jessica maintained a clear view of the sidewalk. She stood between classmates, incognito under shaded bushes, one among a group of four teenagers in red skirts and white sleeves. Every shirt pocket bore a distinct gold and red triangle, School of Albion stitched above. Far behind the evergreen nook lay the academic terrace: three classroom floors and three wings folded into a U around the courtyard. Behind the structure resided the overgrown garden, where students spent their recess and after-school leisure.


Chapter 22: Epistemology Part 2