Seventeen Crimes

Eleven

For the record, Brie never found out why, exactly, she became a political prisoner.

There were never charges filed against her. She accepted the political refugee status being offered to her, and she went before a judge one more time, before being loaded into a sizable cargo van, one of half a dozen people being transferred to the Martian Embassy in Bikini Beach, Florida.

For the record, there were rumors of the list of seventeen crimes, but like the Uyghurs minority in China, people like her were simply vanishing.

If there ever was one question, one thing that Brie did from any stand point, legal or otherwise, she never learned what it was.

And that left the door open to speculation.

She laid in her cell, the massively bright lights beaming down on her, making it impossible to sleep until utter exhaustion simply claimed her body, racking her brain to know what the question was.

What was Brie Reyes' crime?

Reading a book?

She read several in the months leading up to her incarceration. She read about ten on the subject of climate change alone, including a missive that was largely suppressed in the circles she moved in, called the 'Conspiracy of Change'. In that book, it posed the question that, if the cause of global warming was carbon, how much did the world really need to sustain itself? For that matter, shouldn't humans be treated as part of the ecosystems they were said to be destroying?

That led to the question she asked of the newly appointed climate czar in the first televised interview – oh, the accolades! The privileged it was to be the first person to sit across from that new secretary and to be the first to interview them for prime time television.

The interview was supposed to open doors for her.

She remembered struggling to find just the right outfit for the interview. She didn't want to do Jane Paulie, or Barbra Walters – God, they were ancient. But they were effective. And groundbreaking.

She didn't want to bring across Hilary Clinton vibes, either, in pants suits and flouncy blouses. Or that whole generation, for that matter; too old, too dated, too dead.

Tulsi Gabbard started batting for the wrong political team, so styling herself after her was out.

For that matter, asking why the wildfires raged in the Rocky Mountains for most of the summer – was that because the law simply didn't allow for humanity to preform the acts that kept nature healthy, name removing the dead wood to be used as fire and building material, to release bio char back into the environment, to feed the ground and the plants growing that needed it?

Or to question the mining techniques still being used in China, still stripping the ground for rare Earth minerals.

Especially when it was reveled that Mars had a cache of rare earth minerals and made, essentially, Earth-made microchips a thing of their developmental past?

Was any of that the right question, or rather, the wrong question that changed everything?

Or was it the question of her family dynamics? Was the wanting to know what really happened to her father, to her family, the wrong thing to ask?

When she finally sat down and watched the video from her father – and it took a solid, additional week to work up the nerve to do just that – it began in the strangest of places for her.

It began with Stephan Hodges, a man that she never expected to hear from, uttering a single sentence that she never thought she would here from him. Ever.

"I love you, Brie, and I record this message to you, asking you to forgive me."

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