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

With cat eyes, Jessica surveyed the placement of explosives on every support beam. The LEDs blinked from green to red. 


Beelz and her men repeated the action on the next floor, which housed a grandiose lounge in front of a glossy white conference room. Every corner was home to an animated plant: a swirling stem whose sealed petals housed blue bioluminescence; a cactus-like curiosity with razor-sharp pink petals; a white vine whose stem sprouted dancing dandelions; and fungi with glowing green caps extending over one another like a lava lamp. They were the kinds of off-world wonders Jessica wished would decorate her room, but she had to abandon curiosity long enough to note the gigantic pillars around the conference table Ð They almost blended into their surroundings, yet were oddly redundant.


Without a wasted beat, Beelz's crew set more explosives and returned to the stairs en route to floor 85. During their upward trudge, Monarch's anxious and heavy breath returned.


Chapter 67: The Demon of Dissent Part 2