When the reclusive, cynical systems administrator, Petor Fidelistro, discovers that one of his own servers has been cracked late one night, he makes it his personal business to track down the perpetrator. What his search uncovers thrusts him, unaware, into a mad shifting between worlds, time and alien minds.
Fighting to keep his grip on reality, and forcing him to cope with his past, Petor finds himself uncontrollably transitioning between sentient minds that range from semi-conscious to dominant, from beings whose bodies and identities he can control, to those who control him so fully as to be unaware of his presence.
As the story unfolds, Petor gathers clues in a twisting mystery that sends him shifting between the mourning child Nanzicwital; the golem giant Faskin; the lascivious, female ambassador Desidia; and Nokinis, an insane prisoner with whom Petor battles for mastery of his own memories. As he struggles to make sense of what is happening to him, Petor finds himself embroiled in the tumultuous upheaval of a ubiquitous society that transcends life, itself.
Read an excerpt!I’m not writing this damn thing because I really think you ought to care – though you should. Everyone should, everywhere. Hell, I don’t even want to care, myself.
Now, I don’t know when it all started, so I’m going to begin from when I first began to notice stuff happening, out of the blue. I didn’t have any warning. There were no portents, no eerie feelings that made my hair stand on end. There was just me, working, like I always do, on a computer.
Let’s get something straight: I’m not some half-witted, hip web jockey who meanders around the Internet squandering time looking for “cool” web sites. I work on the net. I design the computers that house the sort of useless information absolutely everybody just has to see these days. I design the networks the world’s lusers use to instantly message their lame-o friends about lame-o garbage.
So there I was three days ago – was it only three days ago? Was it a week? How many days? It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Well, whatever it was, I was still at work, and damn tired.
As a matter of fact, I had just dozed off and had had yet another one of those flying dreams, where I feel as if I am myself and yet somehow not myself. I remember the color of everything seemed wrong in that dream, like I had been wearing some trippy purple shades, or something, but I hadn’t been. And then, as I was flying, I changed again and was someone else, but, somehow, still, I was myself.
Dreams. I’m sure mine are no more or less strange than anyone else’s. I remember I awoke with a start and instinctively glanced at the clock. I was relieved to see that it was just a quarter past eight. I’d only drifted off for a few minutes. I was alone. All of the lusers had already gone home.
Well, Yury was still there, pushing three squeaky-wheeled trash cans past my door on his way out. It was the sound of the trash cans that had woken me up. I rubbed my eyes and smiled at him. His jacket was on, and he looked about ready to call it a night.
“Hey Yury,” I said, for some damn reason.
“Hello Mister Fidelistro,” he said as a smile flickered across his thin lips.
“How’s Kirill? How’s he doing?”
“The same,” he said, while looking hard at some empty spot on the floor and absent-mindedly placing his right hand on his heart.
“If there’s anything I can do…”
“Only pray, Mister Fidelistro.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. Maybe someday I would. “Night, Yury.”
He nodded and wheeled the trash away towards the freight elevator.
Poor Kirill, such a sweet kid. He has this incredibly wise, quiet look about him, like he knows absolutely everything in the world. I’ve gone to visit him in the hospital a few times since he started living there.
There’s no better proof that life isn’t fair than what happened to Kirill. All the rat bastards in the world just keep screwing us all while an innocent kid like him gets a short life of tubes, needles and pain.
So, anyway, I was working, as I said, and I had just remotely accessed my servers at home to check the logs when I noticed a username I didn’t recognize: erudire1. Intrigued, I started snooping through the log files to see when the account had been created, and by whom.
It only took me a few seconds to figure it out. I leaned back in my chair, nodded and smirked to myself. The answer was all too obvious: I had been cracked.
After a minute of mad pounding on my crappy Microsoft keyboard, I found out how it had been done. I had been running several services. The one in question was the file transfer protocol daemon (ftpd).
I had the server daemon running wide open, so any anonymous person could log in and see what files were there and download them. I code for a number of open source projects, and my site is directly linked to those same projects, as well as being routinely indexed by every search engine on the net. It’s not as if I were keeping it secret.
Of course, I knew leaving the sever open for any anonymous person to access was something of a security risk. However, I didn’t have any top secret data on that particular machine. Besides, no one had ever tried to break in before.
I looked up and skimmed through the specs on the exploit. The weird thing was, this was an old hack; I thought this security hole had been plugged upstream. It was kind of a pain in the ass to tell for certain, what with certain vendors backporting patches but leaving the version numbers unchanged. Damn broken package systems … Still, if it hadn’t been plugged, I was certain that hacking the ftpd wouldn’t be hard to do, but there really was no reason to, nothing to gain. It would sort of be like trying to break in through the back door of an abandoned church when the front door was hanging open.
So, I was more intrigued about why anyone would bother to break into my server than upset about the fact that it had been done. Overall, it took me just under ten minutes to reverse all the damage I could find and lock out the person who had “broken in”. Plus, of course, I uninstalled the vendor’s version, downloaded the latest source code for the daemon straight from the project’s development page, then compiled and installed that one. And then, just to be sure, I changed the config, moved the port to a non-standard value, cycled the daemon, and plugged the NAT hole so the standard port was shut off to the world. I figured I’d setup something better, later. As things stood, it was just too damn bad for scanners and bots.
Maybe I should have stopped there. Maybe I should have left well enough alone. Maybe then I wouldn’t be in this mess, and she would still be alive.
Read the reviews!"The Canker Death by James R. Bottino is a mystery, a spiritual awakening, a suspenseful and funny book with complex characters and worlds. This book reminds me a bit of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series and also reminds me that good ideas are still out there amidst the plethora of over-worked, tired concepts prevalent in our world today. How did the author slip in symbolism and deep themes all the while entertaining us with the “full monty” of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and stuff that explodes? I’m not sure, but by the time I’d finished The Canker Death, it made me laugh, cry, hang on by the seat of my pants, and shout “SEQUEL!!!” (although the book does stand well on its own.) Also, while reading, I found the Vitruvian Man map full of symbols, character names and concepts to be a provocative and neat little extra feature. I highly recommend this original tome!"- Amazon Reviewer RIBH"The Canker Death takes a hold of the reader and doesn’t let them go until the end."--The Hot Author Report
James R. Bottino’s life-long interests mix esoteric and disparate fields of study. By day, his foremost influences have been the study of literature and the art of writing. Following these pursuits led him to read anything he could in these areas and to complete every under-graduate and graduate course available to him in the field of creative writing. Following this line, he taught high school English throughout the 1990’s, focusing on the teaching of writing. By night, when no one was looking, he studied computer systems / networks, computer languages, and operating systems, learning anything he could in these areas, first as a hobby, and, finally, as a career. This mixture of literature and technology served as the inspiration for the The Canker Death’s protagonist, Petor. James currently lives in a suburb of Chicago, with his wife, daughter, two Australian cattle dogs and far, far too many books and abstruse computers. You can visit his website at TheCankerDeath.com.
