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

Even Monarch's death passed like a ripple in a sea of moments, one equation in an algorithm of sacrifice. His people wanted to mourn, evidenced by their gaunt faces, but there was no time to while the rest of the world beckoned. It was Beelz who gave the order to keep going, and Jessica agreed, trudging over the fallen of the 86th floor. One functional elevator carried the last operatives to the next level. And as the number blinked from 86 to 87, Jessica felt a hand squeeze her arm. She was met by the evergreen death stare.


"Make this count or else..." said Beelz.


Jessica pulled away. "I've been counting just to keep my head. Monarch died on the 1,687th second since the start of this mission."


Chapter 69: Share, Comment, Subscribe Part 1