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

"Plot holes aside," Jessica continued, "I think the new security directives are the prime reason for it all."


"My theory: Goliath hoped an artificial domestic threat would let them tighten their grip on the Edens, and no one would question it. An investigation of SK-3's source code could undermine all of it. In other words, they blinked."


"For the first time in a hundred years, they blinked," said Jessica, and her jaw fell. "These are only the things we know about..." Hearing a couple of sighs, she eyed Shannon and Valerie whose mugs were darkly and disturbed. "I don't have to spell it out. This is why they're hunting me."


Amon crossed his arms. "We won't learn more unless we get inside their HQ."


The dates... "Or we can just put two and two together," Jessica said, snorting. "Pine Rim was not an accident, and neither was the date on which it happened."


"The day Anglos celebrate reunification?"


Jessica darted her eyes side to side. "Valerie."


Chapter 39: Calculating In Your Sleep Part 2