Crow - The Awakening (20 page)

The tree house seemed to tremble with his growing fury and Steven closed his eyes and struggled to bring it under control. A drawing fell off the wall and he opened his eyes and looked at it. It was of his parents from a nightmare a couple of years ago. He picked it up and couldn't help but cry. He was so focused that he was having trouble processing the emotions. He was angry that they had been taken from him, and mourned the lost years that could never be recovered. He had lost his childhood in his obsession and they had lost his childhood altogether. He caressed the page sadly and looked at the video for a long while. He wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. It was time to do something. He wasn't sure what yet, but he had to share this with Dmitri. It started to dawn on him that Dmitri was right. These people would surely not want just anyone on their network or seeing what they were doing.

Steven suddenly felt very vulnerable. On the other networks, he could tell how visible he was and was able to evade other hackers quite easily, especially once he'd done it once or twice and learned how to distract them with decoys. It came naturally to him. There was one that seemed to be hunting him and he often found himself ducking out of the way, but it was easy to see that person coming a mile off. This network, however, was completely new to Steven. And the nature of it was exactly what his godfather hinted at, if not beyond. His legs got numb as he considered the possibility that he could have just spied on the very people who had abducted his parents. Suddenly Steven was faced with an entirely virgin network to start searching, one that transcended anything he had been on before. He had to show this to Dmitri. Perhaps this would change his mind, because he could really use his mentor's input on this. He felt so alone and overwhelmed. Those were his parents, that he was convinced of. But he still didn't know where they were and he needed all the help he could get to find them and free them.

Dmitri had just finished an early afternoon tea when someone dinged the bell on the library counter. He got up and looked out, and saw a very flustered looking Steven who looked like he had just come in from a long run.

"Steven? Are you okay?" Dmitri was a little concerned at the look on Steven's face.

"Don't be mad at me, okay?" Steven started off. Dmitri groaned inside. Usually conversations that start with that don't end well. He was sure exactly what Steven was going to say.

"Can I guess that you didn't drop the computer chip thing?" Dmitri looked at Steven over his reading glasses. What had Steven done that prompted him to run all the way back to the library?

"Oh, we are so beyond that, Dmitri. Way beyond that," Steven blurted out. He put his laptop on the counter and powered it up. "This is going to blow your socks off."

Dmitri gave him a look as he waited to see what Steven had come all this way to show him.

"Do you remember those structures we saw in the substrate?" Steven asked, referring to the image that he generated from his quantum scanning microscope. "Those are beyond anything I have seen before." Steven was impatient, waiting for the laptop to finish booting up. He looked intensely at Dmitri. "The junctions we saw were not just an interface, but a complete abstraction layer for a system that runs infinitely variable ternary software. Ternary!" Steven exclaimed. Ternary's third bit that could be any number of values vastly expanded on just how powerful software could be.

Dmitri was both terrified and fascinated. Whoever made this was far beyond anything he had worked with before. And whoever made this would surely not welcome strangers poking around their system. "Steven, you are crossing into very dangerous waters."

"You haven't seen anything yet." Steven was talking fast, hoping to get everything in before Dmitri shut him out. "The hardware underneath is all connected by a network that is totally different from anything I've seen. I'm guessing something using entanglement. Range is infinite, it appears, and instantaneous. I'm sending and receiving signals from around the world with zero delay!" The laptop finally finished booting up. Steven found the video he recorded. "And it gets even better. Watch this." He opened the movie and stepped back.

Dmitri's mouth hung open as he watched the video. "Steven. What have you done?" he whispered. His level of alarm rose when the video cut out. "Did you stop the video or did it stop on its own?"

"I kept losing the stream. I couldn't reconnect because I don't know how to identify them yet and there are so ridiculously many," Steven explained, hoping that Dmitri would see just what a breakthrough this was. "Dmitri, these might be the people who took Mom and Dad. Those are my parents there!" Steven pointed at the second part of the video. "Dmitri, I've found them!"

"Steven, you didn't lose the stream. They stopped it!" Dmitri almost yelled. "They detected you watching and cut you off." He was furious. "Don't you think as advanced as all this is that they wouldn't be able to detect someone snooping around?"

Steven was taken aback. He had never seen Dmitri so mad. He was usually a very even-keeled person. "I've not had a problem evading detection before, Dmitri." He was sure he wasn't discovered or tracked. After all, there were no black helicopters rushing in or flashing police lights.

"You are walking through a china shop waving a stick recklessly, Steven. You are so smart that you are behaving stupidly and don't even know it. These people may have been who took your parents. How do you think they found out about them?" Steven hadn't given much thought to just how his parents were discovered. Dmitri paced back and forth, very worried and very scared.

"You have got to stop this entirely. If they haven't tracked you yet, you need to lay low and stay off the net altogether," Dmitri nearly commanded him. Steven was appalled at the thought. He was so close to finding answers.

"Dmitri, you don't know what you are asking. I am so close to finding out what happened. Of finding where they are," Steven protested.

"Steven, you have no idea just how right you are. Literally. What happened to them could be what is about to happen to you. You have crossed the line." Dmitri shut down Steven's laptop and shoved it back in the bag. "Until I can be sure that they have not identified you, we are done here. I'm shutting down the wireless and everything."

"No!" Steven begged. "You don't know what you are doing to me."

"Saving you. I hope. Steven, this might not even be enough. It might already be too late. You have got to lay low. Really low!" Dmitri handed the laptop to Steven and rushed him to the door. "Good Lord, Steven. What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking about my parents," Steven explained, shocked and feeling Dmitri was overreacting way too much.

"Your parents would not want you to fall into the same trouble they are in, Steven." Dmitri walked him outside, looking up and down the street. "Steven, I have been in some serious situations in my previous line of work. This is beyond that. Please trust me. Go home and stay home."

With that admonition, Dmitri shut the door, leaving Steven standing on the sidewalk wondering just what happened. This was all wrong. It didn't even remotely happen how he imagined it would happen. The sun was waning, so Steven started making his way home.

Dmitri watched Steven walk off. It broke his heart to have to be so hard on the kid, but Steven just didn't have any comprehension of the very real danger he was in. He looked at the phone, knowing what he should do, but hating the idea of having to do it. Steven's godparents needed to know. This was beyond sneaking scrap computer parts and various books to Steven. He walked over to the phone, brokenhearted. This will be seen as a betrayal by Steven, but he didn't have any other choice. Dialing the number, he waited until he heard someone pick up. "Hello? Mr. Crow? We need to talk."

"Yes, sir." Laurence spoke into his cell phone succinctly. "No, I'm not at a terminal right now, but you should have my report." He had sent a diversionary report to his pseudo boss at the cyber security agency and was in the process of shutting down that operation. "Yes, that's the one."

He had just arrived at a small town in the northwest and was pulling into a parking lot near the square. It was evening and getting dark fast, and Laurence frowned at the distraction. But he still had to maintain his cover and not burn any bridges. "Yes, sir, that's correct. I'm zeroing in on a group that associates itself with the hacker group Anonymous." Laurence smiled. Those guys are easy to blame for hacks like this, even though the sophistication of the actual hacks were quite beyond any average computer geek. It was trivial to fake the evidence, however, and Laurence expected that case to be closed soon. "No, but it's just a matter of time. I have posted surveillance on several potential targets and have passed that upstream." Some of those targets were completely fictitious but would be filled with freshly cooling bodies when the time came to close this particular case for good. That detail he left to Jacob's discretion.

Laurence put the car in park and opened his briefcase. In it was a couple of small cases. He opened one of those and pulled out a leather hand-strap that had a short, sturdy needle protruding from it. When worn, the needle would be positioned pointing away from the palm of his hand. It currently had a rubber cover over the needle for safety. Laurence checked the small vial that fed the needle to make sure it was loaded, and flicked it with his finger to see the bubble move. "Yes. I'll be back at the office next week." He put the hand-strap on, removed the safety cover from the needle and carefully pulled on a pair of thin leather riding gloves. With a little pressure, the needle punctured through the soft material of the glove and he put the safety cap back on the needle. "Of course, sir. We'll have this nailed down pretty quickly." He smiled, looking across the street. "Yes, sir. See you next week." He put the phone down and gave himself a moment to survey the small library and computer shop that was nestled in the town square shopping center. It was time to get to work.

Steven took a shortcut through the hills back to the farm. While he had obtained his drivers license a year ago, he still did not own a car and had not really given much thought to getting one. He was so used to the forest that the thought of sticking to a narrow strip of concrete was repulsive to him. There was no strength in the concrete, no energy. Just dead rock and gravel. Jonah normally ferried him to his classes in Seattle and it always struck him how the forest flowed past him outside the window on either side of the highway so fast that he would never get to experience it because he sat in a little steel box that passed by too quickly. He couldn't touch the trees and his feet didn't feel the forest floor. He often wondered at why people were so content to limit their experiences to just what they saw through the windows. Even with his aching heart and pain, the forest lent him comfort and strength. Everything was alive and seemed to cradle him as he traveled through it. So he remained on foot. Which suited him fine. Jaunts through the forest and canopy were amazingly invigorating for him and he would typically emerge from the forest as energetically charged if not more so than when he entered the forest.

And yet, this time his conflict with Dmitri left him emotionally drained, especially after such a high from finding more evidence of his parents. The forest dulled the pain somewhat but he was still sorely disappointed with how things had turned out. And he was thoroughly confused with Dmitri's reaction. He had video of his parents. Dmitri saw them. What did his mentor think he was going to find? Did he even expect him to find anything? And now that he had found conclusive proof of his parents continuing existence, Dmitri suddenly wigs out.

Steven shook his head as he reached for another branch and deftly used its springiness to launch him across the void between trees. As he fell into the neighboring canopy he grabbed another branch and it absorbed his momentum enough to allow him to transfer his velocity across the cluster of branches and off into the next tree. It was a near automatic thing for Steven now, allowing him to ponder on the events of the day.

He had possibly lost his only real confidant that he trusted even more than Brandon. Brandon was away at college studying criminal science anyway, so he really didn't have anyone else to share his projects with. Even when Brandon was in town, his world was still eons away from Steven's primary interests. His friend knew some of what he was doing, but not much. There was also his therapist. But Dr. Dougherty didn't really count as this kind of confidant since he was not as technologically inclined and because he was his therapist who answered to his godparents. As a therapist, James had proven extremely invaluable to Steven, but even then there was a certain distance between the two them. Steven wondered if it was because of his outing Asherah as a fantasy. Regardless, Steven felt he couldn't divulge the depth of his obsession with his search to James, even though nearly every other part of his life was fair game.

Of all his closest friends, Asherah had been his only true confidant and and now that was gone as well, thanks to James. But resenting his therapist for helping him recover from that fantasy relationship was totally illogical too, of course. It was like dying of thirst and being mad at someone because they gave you a glass of water. With most regards, James had been very supportive of him and helped him heal. On the worst of days since his liberation from his fantasy James had always been there to guide him through the treacherous waters of despair. Steven had never truly been freed from the presence of Asherah, even with the medicinal tea. He could still feel her in the background, though it was muted. James had taught him to avoid the distraction it caused and insisted that in time it would heal. Today that presence was much more apparent since the last of his tea was wearing off. But so far he was functional. James would have happily been there for him if the fantasy started giving him problems again.

However, today even the therapist had nagged him and added yet another little sour note to the progression of events that led up to now. Steven had stopped by to pick up his prescription of tea and Dr. Dougherty gave him grief for neglecting his medicine and insisted he have a cup of his medicinal tea as soon as he got home. James seemed genuinely angry with him. Steven sighed. Everyone seemed to be dumping on him today and he was ready for the day to end. It started off as a very good day but has since spiraled down. Steven hoped it wouldn't get worse. He just wanted to go to bed and wake up to a new day. For now he felt totally alone and isolated from any kind of support. It was draining him fast.