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

Evening crawled near with their every step into the forest. Gideon kept Jessica's gravity board on his person. She got the flash drive back, but his argument for keeping the rest of her stuff was that he had to inspect everything sinister, even though Danielle had already done as much. Feeling naked, tired, and helpless, all she could do was catch pockets of the leader's conversation with Raptor.


"Glad we got to you when we did," said Dexter's brother.


"Inclined to agree." Gideon snorted then dropped a ball of spit on the ground. "We ain't blind, though. See, only visitors we get are ones lookin' fer trouble. That or a lost lamb, once in a while. The only reason we didn't shoot yer friends is 'cause they're not aliens, far as I can tell."


Jessica steered from the conversation to Shannon. "Where'd you guys leave the car?"


Chapter 46: "Listen, Cyberwhore!" Part 1