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

Disturbed by the depths of a fever dream, Jessica sat up in a hot sweat, panting. The tip of her skull felt weighed down, wary from rest or lack thereof. Perhaps it was the encumbrance of a sleeping bag on the hard floor. The sight of Beth and her friends drowning in a circle of fire did nothing to help. 


The dark carried nothing but the sound of snores. Tip-toeing on concrete, she found her goggles and inspected the state of her friends. Shannon was fast asleep, snug on the couch. Valerie too. She walked over to Danielle, who seemed much nicer asleep than awake in her rocking chair. She couldn't believe they were dancing earlier. She couldn't believe they danced. Already, it felt like nights ago.


Chapter 51: Wherever The Devil Roams Part 1