CHAPTER 1
Jada's fingers danced across the holographic interface, her eyes narrowed in concentration as she navigated the labyrinthine code. The air was thick with the familiar scent of ozone, a byproduct of the powerful processors humming within the depths of her modified desktop console.
Outside the grimy window of her cramped apartment, the neon-soaked skyline of New Horizon stretched out in a dazzling display of technological excess. Towering megastructures reached for the clouds, their surfaces glittering with a thousand tiny lights. Streamlined hover-cars and sleek transport shuttles darted between the towering spires, their plasma drives leaving trails of iridescent exhaust in their wake.
Jada spared the breathtaking panorama a brief glance before returning her focus to the task at hand. She had little time for the superficial allure of the city's technological marvels - her interests lay in the hidden pathways that threaded through its digital infrastructure.
With a few deft keystrokes, she breached the security protocols of a high-profile corporate network, her lips curling into a triumphant grin as she navigated the labyrinth of firewalls and encryption algorithms. This was her domain, a realm where her razor-sharp intellect and unparalleled coding skills made her the master of her own destiny.
As she delved deeper into the system, her expression suddenly shifted to one of puzzled concentration. Embedded within the routine data streams was an anomaly - a highly encrypted transmission that seemed to originate from an off-world location.
Jada narrowed her eyes, her fingers flying across the controls as she attempted to isolate and decrypt the signal. After several tense minutes, she was finally able to break through the layers of obfuscation, revealing a garbled distress call.
Her breath caught in her throat as she listened to the fragmented transmission, her mind racing to piece together the fragments of information. The message was faint and riddled with static, but the underlying terror in the sender's voice was unmistakable.
"...under attack...colony...barely holding... need... immediate..." The transmission dissolved into a burst of white noise, then fell silent.
Jada sat back in her chair, her heart pounding. A colony under attack? She knew the corporations maintained a robust network of off-world settlements and research outposts, but an event catastrophic enough to warrant such a desperate distress call was unheard of.
Chewing her lip in contemplation, she cross-referenced the signal's point of origin, searching for any publicly available intel on the location. After a few minutes of digging, she unearthed a dossier on the Kepler-22b colony - a remote, resource-rich settlement on the edge of the known star systems.
"Kepler-22b..." Jada murmured, rolling the name over her tongue. It was a fascinating prospect - an opportunity to uncover a potentially explosive corporate secret, if the distress call was legitimate. Her natural curiosity and thirst for adventure warred with her sense of self-preservation.
With a resigned sigh, she leaned back in her chair, her gaze unfocused as she contemplated her next move. Jada had always prided herself on her ability to walk the line between right and wrong, using her formidable hacking skills for personal gain without crossing into outright criminality. But this...this was uncharted territory.
She chewed her lip, her brow furrowed in thought. Something deep inside her knew she couldn't simply ignore the plea for help, no matter the risk. Steeling her resolve, she turned back to the console, her fingers flying across the controls as she set out to unravel the mystery of the Kepler-22b distress signal.