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

A prompt medical screening derived no serious injury, so Jessica returned home that same night. She wouldn't leave, at first. Beth's remains were somewhere; they had to be. The cleanup crew was coy, however, and offered nothing until they came upon the necklace, the six-sided star.


Under the dark sky, only the sound of her feet brought company. Hers was a slow gait of remorse, down and down the village avenues, head low in the cast shadow of evening lights. Plenty of white orbs to guide her path home, although her thoughts did not wander to Apple Mire. They retreated in the silence of solitude. No other soul stirred on the path home, a path long-winding. The gravity board had never felt so useless.


She mumbled recitations nearly every step of the way. Beyond the yards and terraces, she repeated them. Past the closed doors of cafes and restaurants, she cemented them. At the storefront where big, lightless letters spelled Tacquizza, she shouted them. 


Chapter 25: Blindsided Part 2