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 keen tingle on Jessica's wrist brought a message: Tic Toc, a reminder that grappled her out of Valerie and Shannon's arms and back to her computer. Her friends curiously observed the screen, as all the files and screenshots downloaded before she removed the flash drive.


"Can I have my gun back, Shannon?" said Valerie.


Jessica stomped fast. "Wipe everything, Babel! Belay that, actually. Wipe everything but leave a care package, yea?"


"Very well. We shall continue this in the next domain, Lynx." The room went dark, and the green blink from Jess's watch served a luminescent curtain to her geek space.


Valerie's pupils expanded. "What are you doing, Jess?"


"Leaving," she said. She grabbed several belongings from the desktop, retrieved a tablet off the shelves, and placed an alternative set of clothes and necessities in her backpack.


"You really just wipe everything in your computer?" Shannon said apprehensively.


Chapter 30: Under Eden Part 1