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

A solemn night sky blanketed the world. All Raptor could do was land at the first pitstop, which turned out to be nothing more than an isolated power station in a dry part of the territory. Overhead, a bright white sign and its illuminated hare previewed their point on the map: Hare Raiser Power rotating in all directions, situated on the side of a trafficless road leading to and from New Sumer. Neither Jessica nor her friends knew what to expect in this remote area, where Raptor stopped to recharge the sedan. In so doing, they found two other vehicles parked in the slots. Distant and parallel to the driver's side, an old couple casually recharged their black microcar. Two batteries over lay a driverless sedan. 


Within seconds of their touching down, Raptor hopped out of the driver's seat. "Let's be quick," he said. "Shannon, work the charger while I'm inside?"


"Uhh, alright," she muttered. "What are you doing?"


Chapter 55: I Haven't Had Coffee Part 1