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

Halfway up the flight of stairs, leg soreness started to kick in. Just a little more, she kept thinking. No more conspiracies, no more running, no more dragging my friends through this nightmare. In tandem with fatigue, hopeful prospects accompanied her all the way to the top, where she found the other side.


On the roof, where she became reacquainted with the night sky, she recoiled at the deplorable sight of Malvis standing in the middle, waiting. White coat under the stars, boots on the concrete, hands behind his back, he stared like a statue. Nothing made less sense than his composure.


"You are the final piece," he began, walking casually. "Your alliesÑfellow traitors, Sub Terra and the operatives in the city, are apprehended. And what remains shall follow."


Warily, Jessica hung off his every word. Out of a thousand absolutes, she grabbed ahold of one. She would not surrender.


"In simple terms, you have failed, Lynx."


Chapter 62: Neon Boughs Part 3