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

When they arrived, Gideon and Raptor strode at the behest of a scrambling ranger camp. Lanterns gathered in a wave as innumerable Woodsmen rushed out of their hideouts and into the open. The encroaching lights served as their warning, the direction from which Jessica and her friends raced. 


Jessica and her friends halted next to Gideon, where she attempted but failed to part lips. Danielle stomped up to her uncle, reloading her rifle, mutely, with an expression that made him cock his shotgun. Valerie scanned the woods for signs of evil as Shannon ran back to the mansion.


Raptor stared a thousand yards before he inspected his brother's unconscious state. "There's no good explanation for this."


"An Azarean agent!" Jessica practically yelled.


Chapter 54: The Lanterns Part 2