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

Jessica and Dexter trudged up the next hill, navigating terrain seemingly untouched by civilization. Not a soul in sight, not a strand or hint of man-made mechanisms infringed upon the avenues of leaves. Only solitude. Never having visited the wilderness, Jessica had no clue what to expect. The novelty of their surroundings was almost tangible enough to rub the skin. The sun's descent envisioned a spiraling shift in the scenery. New traits came in the iridescence of local flora.  Deeper into the region, the undulating shades morphed from cool greens to warm reds and yellows while the unrecognizable trees embalmed a sense of mystery no thinner than the air they breathedÑwhich almost seemed alien. Never had she laid eyes on so many wreaths of nature.


Chapter 45: The Woodsmen Part 2