People had to live under sanctions in Cuba, so this was where the Caribbean Software Pirate raised her black flag and started spreading code.

It had been quite a while since people sold software in shrink-wrapped boxes. Nowadays software was all about the subscription model, or else “surveillance capitalism.” But there was still software that only a software pirate could sell to people, Mostly malware, such as DDOS programs, bank trojans and credit-card ripoff code.

And movies and music, of course. Mostly reggae, reggaeton, soca and cumbia (because of her cool Caribbean heritage) but also pirated movies, and, her personal favorite, movies about cool pirates.

There were islands out in the net where people just couldn’t get the movies they deserved and wanted. That was the Software Pirate would pull into harbor with her open wifi and 200 terabytes of every high-definition pirate movie ever made. Hollywood pirates, Bollywood pirates, Hong Kong pirates, pirate movies from tiny national cinemas, like Turkey and the Philippines, that nobody but her had ever thought to rip-off.

The Software Pirate hated intellectual property; she hated national laws; she had six passports and five flags on her sailing yacht, which had formerly carried huge bales of Columbian marijuana and now mostly carried digital entertainment for starving Venezuelans.

And she had heard of a private, dark network — the “Cyberdeck” — with encrypted software from a digital elite. Her plan was simple: she would steal that from them and make ‘em walk the plank.

Bruce Sterling