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

"Is it who you are or something someone else tells you to be?"


Drugs in her hand, painful memories, and the endless wish to step away from reality left her dreary in the eyes. "I need this," Jessica said hoarsely. Closer steps, the white pants neared.


"If you can look me in the eye with complete belief in that, then you go right ahead and take it."


Once again, Jessica eyed the Mesnomer. As it dropped from her hand, she felt stomach knots and the prelude to a headache. Wrapped in her own arms, she tried to hide the pain. "What the hell can I believe in?" she sobbed.


"Start with yourself," the lady pressed. "If you start there, life will be your looking glass!"


"Jessica snickered. "You can fuck off." 


The lady stared disquietly at Jessica's rising glare. On the verge of a breakdown, the teenager's sanguine eyes leered before she coughed words like vomit. 


Chapter 23: Epistemology Part 3