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

The scent of phantom rainfall tricked the senses while Jessica and Sub Terra soared toward the storm. Faceless tides of wind braced every passenger on deck, their grimaces lit under the red diodes throughout the cabin: an ensemble of determination, anxiety, and fear. And just outside, outlined in the dark, an array of airships bobbed and weaved across the night sky.


There was a taut rope over and underneath the cabin floor. "Is something pulling that?" Jessica asked when a hand suddenly sprouted.


"Hey!" Two men grabbed hold of the hand and pulled Shannon's body up. Jessica nearly dropped when she saw her friend pant on the floor, crouched.


"That was freaken wild!" Shannon gasped.


On the verge of pulling her hair out, Jessica stammered, "What's your malfunction, Shannon? This isÑit's a dangerous place to be. Hija-su-pinche-madre-fock-en-mother-of-a-cyber-loving-bitch-face-fuck-is-wrong-with-you?"


Shannon grimaced. "I wasn't going to let you guys go it alone!"


Chapter 63: Curtain Fire Part 1