Crow - The Awakening by Michael J. Vanecek Read Free Book Online Page B

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