Seventeen Crimes

Twelve

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

She immediately paused the video, rubbing her index finger over the fidget beads on her finger. Brie swallowed, so thankful that she was alone. Although at this point, she doubted Dylan would have any desire to watch any video from this man.

Oh, he was so old looking. Grey claimed his black hair, turning it blue. Lines etched his face and white ran streaks through his neatly trimmed beard. A faded, old bandanna was wrapped around his head the way she remembered it, and his glasses hung a little bit crooked on his nose.

That nose. That Roman nose – what fight did he break his nose in?

Tears stung her eyes as Brie tried to merge the image of this man with the man she saw last – and struggled to do so. There still was something different about him. Something she couldn't place and couldn't remember.

The first to speak was right....

Brie held up her press badge and identification before going through the pat down at the secret service and hurried to her seat just as the press secretary wrapped up the introductions for the President.

The man stepped forward, and promptly spilled his words, mumbling into his rag to cover his mouth and from time to time, making a relatively incomprehensible jargon from time to time.

The White House usually released notes after his speeches.

"My son died," he finally said, making some logical sense. "But before he died – he died of cancer, you know – he started researching climate change and talking to me, and to Gore – really, to anybody he could talk to about it. We've got to change our attitude about.

"We need more solar cars, more solar panels, more solar lights. We need to get ourselves off fossil fuels and other resources that pollute our environment. This is why my son died."

Everyone in the room knew that wasn't why his son died; his son died of an automobile wreck that caused massive trauma to his body. Police reports were repeatedly used to debunk this particular myth – any time the president brought up his son and his death, for this reason, that reason or another.

The president's son after slamming into a tractor-trailer after it crashed in an accident – the accident had been a massive 90-car pile up on the highway following the collapse of a bridge. The man died because he was traveling at excessive speed (some reports say that the whole of traffic that day was traveling at speeds closer to eighty or ninety miles. The force of the accident actually caused the man's head to decapitate from the spinal column, while his skin didn't break.)

"For that, I am appointing Victoria Chandler to be the first green initiatives and I charge her with working with the United Nations to create legislation that would make breaking our climate laws illegal and create stiffer penalties for doing so."

Brie looked down as her phone vibrated and opened it to an email from her editor. The email contained a list of questions that had been 'approved' for her to use during this conference.

She pondered the questions, occasionally tapping the screen to keep it from going dark on her. And she listened as the woman took to the microphone to take questions from the press.

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