Today's #flashfiction The Software Pirate

“My eyes are up here.”

Medusa* #quote

CJ's going to be coming over this week so that'll be nice. Hopefully I won't have too many seizures. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Software Pirate

        “Arrr,” said the black-bearded software pirate in anger as he held morning coffee in tired disdain of the morning. His right hand firmly hooked around his mouse while he clasped his mouse. He lazily pegged one of his legs on his desk. He wore a black baseball cap with a skull on it along with a black t-shirt with the same skull.

        “Stupid computer, squawk, stupid computer!” The software pirate's pet parrot mimicked him from the previous day. The parrot then imitated the answering machine. “Davey the boss wants the software. Get the software!”

        “You just got to remind me huh little buddy,” Davey replied. He put down his coffee and pulled out a cracker from his desk drawer and threw it between the cage bars to the parrot. It took owning the parrot for awhile to learn how to do that, and baseball with his Dad when he was young, to learn how to throw. “Don't worry Jolly, my little feathered friend, we'll get the software the boss wants and get all the money we need for all the crackers you want.”

       Davey laughed to himself. He knew that only talked to his pet parrot most of the time. He probably needed more friends. Or even better a girlfriend. Well, once the boss paid him the three million he won't have any problem getting either. Invest and he'll be a rich man for quite some time.

The operation was risky, and difficult. He pirated and stole music and games for most of his life. Cracking the security of game companies. Not exactly Fort Knox. But recently he decided to pirate software inside a Fort Knox. Military software. He didn't feel afraid though. On the screen it all looked the same. It's not like he saw men with guns. Just firewalls and whatever else. As harmless as any other company. Right?

        A few hours of work later and he plundered the program from the military server and onto his computer. When it finished downloading he smiled and thought of all the fancy cars he would have. With the three million the boss would be paying him and a bit of hacking of the stock exchange he knew he could be one of the richest men alive. Davey didn't put much thought into what the boss would be doing with the military program.

       The door to his apartment was then kicked down. He heard the crash several rooms over. He heard many footsteps with a proclamation of his full name, the phrase “we have a warrant” and his furniture being overturned.

       He quickly pushed a few keys on his keyboard. An ultimate backup plan. It dumped the files on his computer into a hidden remote area of the Internet and began to wipe his computer clean. That was a great deal of data, as his computer was more like twenty computers combined into one to make a homemade supercomputer. He had to steal most of the parts from the computer company he worked for in his day job as they were out of what he could possibly afford.

      The footsteps belonged to what looked like a combination of S.W.A.T. and Marines. Had they caught him poking around the military servers beforehand? Was he in that much trouble? Was him actually pulling the data the thing they needed to arrest him? These questions ran through his head. Stealing the data finally became scary where instead of just working on his computer and dealing with websites and hacking he was staring down real people with real weapons who considered him a real threat. With the guns they must have thought he might have been a bigger operation. Though considering how much he was going to paid for it, maybe he was part of something he couldn't even fathom.

      It didn't matter how big he was as an operation though. They arrested him. The computer managed to be wiped in time that they couldn't find evidence of him having the stolen data, but they did have enough evidence of him accessing the servers and several other crimes. A trial later put the notorious pirate away for several years. But he never revealed the location of where he buried his hidden data on the Internet. Perhaps some hacker will find his treasure someday.