Crow - The Awakening by Michael J. Vanecek

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