Crow - The Awakening (6 page)
The view of the forest up that high was mesmerizing and Steven sat down on the thatched roof to admire the scenery for a few minutes. All around him he could see the tops of trees and the hills beyond them. The breeze created a gentle rocking motion in the treetops and he could feel the strength of the tree all the way to its roots. He found the sensation comforting and it helped him center himself before diving into his projects. Steven looked over his shoulder at his backpack and decided his new toys required his immediate attention.
With the deftness of one who had done it hundreds of times, he swung down from the top of the tree house onto branches below the structure and pushed the hatch in the floor up against the trunk inside and climbed up into the tree house. He peeked out to make sure no one noticed him, then closed the hatch. His tree house was well hidden, but there was always the chance that a hunter could spot it.
The interior was surprisingly roomy for such a modest tree house. The inner walls were a much tighter weave than the exterior walls. He pulled back the drapes from the portholes and suddenly the interior was flooded with light, making him wince a little. With the late afternoon sun shining in through the portholes, he had more than enough natural light to work with for most of the day. Whistling to himself, Steven found his main perch where he did most of his work. While most of the branches emerging from the trunk within the tree house itself were pruned back, a few were kept and strung with straps made out of dried inner bark to form seats that allowed Steven to sit at the counter.
Steven tossed his backpack onto a clear spot on the counter he had built into the wall and dug into it. There was a slight breeze that caused the tree house to sway back and forth gently, and he had to put his spare pencils in a cup he had screwed to the counter to keep them from rolling off. He then eagerly dug out his electronics. He hoped these remaining few pieces would give him the networking independence he needed so he wouldn't have to depend on others to get files for him. He grabbed a handmade wooden box sitting amongst numerous wooden boxes on the counter, all courtesy of his godfather's workshop, and put the JTAG in it, but kept the thumb drive, wireless specifications and memory out. Those he would be using right away.
He pulled out his sketch pad and found the drawing of his parents he made after the last nightmare. He looked up on the wall of the tree house at numerous other drawings that were very similar. He pulled a splinter out of some deadwood and fashioned it into a pin and pushed that through his drawing into the weave of the wall and stood back. He found it odd that he would be dreaming their features so specifically without ever having seen them except as an infant. Is it possible that an infant could so precisely remember his parents? Steven couldn't be sure. But the drawings felt right. Each drawing served as yet another motivation to continue his search for his parents. He sighed, feeling the weight of the urgency of the search on his shoulders.
After removing the remaining contents of his backpack, and nibbling on a mushroom, Steven went to a large, flat, wooden box sitting where he did most of his work. It had a thin, hinged lid that he opened to reveal his makeshift homemade laptop workstation. On the inside of the lid he had mounted a sizable flat screen computer monitor that he salvaged from a large laptop from Dmitri's computer shop. The box itself contained the guts of his computer, which was a combination of several scraps from discarded laptops that he cobbled together. A hinged cover inside the bottom section of the box gave him easy access to these parts and doubled as a mount for the keyboard. Putting the mushroom on the counter, he lifted up the keyboard cover and inserted the memory into an empty slot on the computer's main board, effectively doubling his capacity. He also plugged the thumb drive Brandon had given him into a USB slot and then put the keyboard down. He had intended to cut slots into the box to let him access the USB ports from outside the box, but had gotten used to the way things were already and never got around to it.
He chose laptop parts rather than personal computer parts because like Steven's LED lighting, laptops typically used minimal power. This made it easy for him to run it for a long time, even on cloudy days - or overnight if he needed to on the battery setup he had put together. They were also rather cheap since many laptops were discarded after a couple of years, even though the reason for them to be discarded had been completely unrelated to the actual circuitry. That made them easy pickings from the scrap pile for him. It took a lot of work to figure the components out, of course. But he was already several years ahead in his schooling and seemed to grasp computing intuitively, so once he got started the path just sort of opened up to him.
The operating system Steven had assembled was actually a cobbled together unix clone taking inspiration from several operating systems that were freely available, plus some utilities that he converted to work on his system. It was heavily customized and trimmed to just the tasks he intended. He only wanted a tool to give him access to the network and that had basic search capabilities as well as hacking and surreptitious networking functions and database connectivity capabilities. It had taken him many months of tinkering to write. At first, he tried freely available systems and then he started trimming them and customizing them until he knew enough to just write his own nearly from scratch. He was amazed at how much stuff he was able to trim from the system to get down to just what he needed. Even the free open source systems seemed bloated by comparison.
He was giddy with hope and danced a circle giggling, shaking the tree house, excited about the possibility of finally getting his networking up and running. The painstaking journey was done surreptitiously, out of sight from his anti-computer godparents. But it was just the start for him. The computer was a tool to an even greater journey, that of searching for his parents the only way he knew how - digging into various databases for any sign or hint of them. Income tax records, loan records, job history, medical history, genealogical records and more were targets he planned to exploit for his search. He couldn't physically look for them, so this was the next best thing. The trail was ten years cold, however, and he was fearful of the difficulty of what he was facing. But no one else seemed to be looking, so it was ultimately up to him. He had spent time on Brandon's computer starting the search but quickly ran into limitations that motivated him to get his own. And now he was on the very cusp of success.
Attached to the bottom of the counter was another large wooden box containing a salvaged off-grid battery charge controller used by many hunting cabins in the area. The cabin Steven got it from was in a severe state of abandonment and disrepair, but the charge controller had been protected in a case and was still in pretty good condition. This was attached to a pair of old golf cart batteries that were tucked under the counter in a little cage he had woven for them. This little system processed and stored the energy collected by his modest collection of solar panels outside. He peeked under the counter and checked the meter on the charge controller to make sure he had a full charge, then flipped a switch to activate the circuit. After diodes lit up indicating a good circuit, he returned to the computer. The little desk lamp came on when he connected the power, giving the little work area more light and he moved junk and spare parts out of the way to make more room to work.
Once he booted into his own operating system, he extracted the files on the thumb drive Brandon had given him and got to work making his wireless network connection work. He was close enough to town to connect to the library's wireless network with the help of the tin can antennae he had placed on the roof of the tree house. Being able to connect using his own computer was his last hurdle for having a fully functional tool in his search for his parents. Up until now he had been sneaking around at the mercy of others and the search was very slow as a result. He typed in a few commands into his laptop and watched as text scrolled up the screen. He had written into his system binary compatibility with many of the free systems out there so it was trivial getting drivers and software to work on his system.
Steven pulled out the notes that had formed the foundation of much of his work. His godfather was, at one time, an engineer for a computing company in Seattle and had made a discovery that horrified him and his wife enough to drop out of the computing environment altogether. Steven couldn't get him to divulge just what that discovery was, however. But Jonah had kept copious and detailed notes of his work and committed them to paper to ensure they weren't digitally lost. Steven had found those notes in a safe he managed to finally unlock. After skimming over them, Steven snuck the notes to the city library to make a copy for deeper reading. From the notes, it wasn't surprising that his godfather had dropped out of the tech world. He could imagine that certain people would be very unhappy he had made this discovery. That made the fact that his parents were missing all the more ominous, however.
After reading these texts, he opted for ultimately writing his own software to better control how every aspect of the computer worked. The free systems were functional enough, but from what Steven had read of the work his godparents had done, they were as vulnerable as any other system and he had to take things up a notch if he was going to be sneaking into networks. The notes illuminated a scary, dark world under the hood of most computers, one that was extremely secretive and dangerous. They indicated that most software and even hardware were engineered to allow unknown hackers to freely enter into any system, regardless of the security measures put in place. A nearly undetectable back door existed, and from what the notes indicated, this "door" didn't require the computer to actually be actively on. Just plugged into the power. Most modern systems never fully turned off when plugged in, which made it easy to surreptitiously utilize the computer for non-sanctioned tasks.
Someone was using these computers and spying on people on a massive scale and manipulating data and transferring resources and funds with no restrictions whatsoever. From what he saw, wars were even sparked by this dark network by exploiting the power of social media and forged messages to various diplomats. That sort of thing was easy enough already, but the power of a practically hidden network made it almost predictable. Being able to observe emails and digital conversations live and the ability to manipulate these communications without being detected gave these people tremendous power over world events. They were people that Steven wished to avoid, but at the same time investigate. They were surely behind the disappearance of his parents and the reason why his godparents were hiding out here in the hills.
By writing his own system software, Steven was able to block most of the hardware exploits indicated in the notes and eliminate the software security holes while at the same time opening those doors for his own exploitation. He even wrote his own microcode that ran on the central processors, closing up even more vulnerabilities. He constructed the system specifically to enter into other computers in his search to find his parents, allowing him to access databases, medical records, real estate records, tax records and more using the very hardware and software exploits that his godfather had discovered. He grinned at the mischievousness of it all, but a part of him remained apprehensive. There was always a chance of being discovered. However, by identifying the secret networks thanks to the notes, Steven was sure he would be a ghost out there.
A part of him was still afraid, however. These people detected and abducted his parents after all. But what choice did he have? If no one else was looking, what could he do? But he felt confident. His parents may have not known of the threat until too late. Steven had the benefit of the notes and their experience to be better prepared.
Steven closed the notes and put them in their own box and relaxed a bit to let the anxiety pass. He daydreamed of spring days and the fresh explosion of growth that resulted from them. The late summer season was seeing a rapid slowing of growth and everything was starting to get ready for winter. He hated that season because soon nearly everything except for the pines went brown and was covered by deep snow for months. He resorted to his imagination to accommodate for that, seeing green growth where snow and winter had made brown and white, making for himself his own little world amidst the desolation of the season. That time wasn't long coming now. Inspired, he took his sketchbook and absentmindedly sketched what he saw. Living plants, flowers, insects, and life of all sorts filled his pages, as well as things he saw in his dreams and people he knew or that stood out in his memory. It was for him a way to record what he most wanted to remember and to make sense out of things that troubled him.
As he passed the time while recompiling his networking software, he looked out one of the portals and noticed that a neighboring tree had fallen, opening up the view a bit. He was happy about that - the other tree was looking rather ratty and was tall enough to cast a shadow on his solar panels during part of the day. He started sketching the new view when a beep from his laptop captured his attention and he looked at the readings from his networking application, bouncing on his chair in anticipation. He had been trying to connect to the library's wireless for a few weeks now but errors in the wireless software and hardware had proven difficult to overcome. Abruptly, a flood of data scrolled across the screen and Steven jumped up whooping and jumping around, causing a flutter outside the tree house as nearby birds were startled into flight.
Suddenly he froze in mid jump, a quizzical look clouding his face at something he had just noticed about the fallen tree. Steven cocked his head, his memory tickled by something he found strange. He looked back out the portal at the space opened up by the tree that fell. The view of the clearing had been blocked by that dying tree and saplings that got broken by its fall, but he could clearly see it now - a large meadow with a towering, light gray pine snag poking out of the center.
