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

Pitch darkness would have characterized the room if not for the marvelous computer arrangement. Little More than a crooked series of seats, wires, and converted toasters.


Crammed between the hardware of the dark tent sat an inconspicuous woman glued to her black, vintage monitor. Another stranger whose red hair gleamed under green glass, absorbed in her computational task. The sound of tapping keys persisted elsewhere, steering Jessica to a black-haired boy in a beanie. Perhaps no older than thirteen, he sequentially snapped his fingers six times then switched hands before returning to the keyboard. Likewise glued to the screen, his head persistently lulled on his shoulder. 


A few steps ahead of Jess, Amon peered over his shoulder at her. "The others are sleeping, but that's Beelz," he said, indicating the fairer redhead. "She won't notice you when she's focused." He pointed to the boy. "Same goes for Boros over there, except he's always that way."  


Chapter 38: Calculating In Your Sleep Part 1