Hero Worship

"Can I ask what you hope to get out of this? Some sort of closure perhaps?" he couldn't stop himself from adding. He felt out of sorts, and unsettled. He had learned to deal with the guilt he had over his delay in going to the police by repression. Her sudden appearance in his life brought everything front and center again.

"Look...you said earlier you were OK with this. If you don't want to do this, I can leave," she answered abruptly, and removed her napkin from her lap and threw it on the place-mat in front of her.

"OK. You're right. I'm sorry. This is all still new to me," he explained.

"Why are you the one who has issues with this? I went through the ordeal, not you," Rachel demanded.

"I still feel guilty. OK? If I had acted earlier, you wouldn't have had to endure all that...," his voice trailed off. 'That', being the thing he couldn't bear to think about; what had happened to her during the week he delayed going to the police. "Maybe they could have found you that same day and...and everything would have been different."

"But you did act, and it saved my life! OK, maybe it was late, but I'm alive now. If you hadn't come forward, surly I wouldn't be here today; he definitely would have killed me, sooner or later."

"How can you be so level headed about this? How are you not fucked-up?" Steve asked.

"I don't know. I should be fucked-up, you're right. That's where most people in my position would have ended up. But, you know what? I didn't want to be all fucked-up. Sure, I had my fucked-up time after the police rescued me, but I made a decision. Not right away, but I came to the decision: that that incident was not going to define me. I wasn't going to let some nut-job ruin my life."

"I applaud you for being so mature about it. I don't know if I could be if I was in your shoes. So, I suppose you've forgiven that bastard for what he did to you?"

"No. Of course not. That's bullshit. I'll never forgive that motherfucker. I'll always hate him. This is not about him. It's about me not being the victim. I've moved on. There's nothing to gain from rehashing the past over and over again and saying: poor me."

At this point the waitress came to the table and took their order. Steve took a couple of deep breaths after he'd given the waitress his lunch order.

As Steve began to relax, he realized he was the one projecting what he'd felt about the incident onto Rachel. The more she spoke, the more he admired her maturity, her sense of self assurance; those qualities were now attractive to him. As they sat talking across from the table from each other in the Little Hen, he started admiring her features: her blue eyes; her auburn hair; a freckle or two left over from puberty; her ample bosom and her exposed cleavage, that he only now allowed himself to notice. Had she selected that blouse to arouse him? In light of the evidence of her maturity, and her ease with her past traumatic event, he now thought maybe she had dressed to impress him. He caught himself staring at her breasts and then reprimanded himself. He was confused. He didn't know how he should treat her, as a friend, the obvious age difference notwithstanding, as a younger sister, or as someone whom he had once saved their life-- however he was suppose to act in that circumstance, he didn't know.

"I want to know everything about you," Rachel said to him with a smile that reminded Steve of her mother.

During lunch, Steve and Rachel shared some of their fondest childhood memories.

At a lull in the conversation, Steve's curiosity got the best of him and he asked, "So, how are you really doing, Rachel? I mean with everything that happened three years ago."

"As, I told you, I'm not going to be the victim here. I've come to terms with the fact that I did nothing to deserve what happened. That, some random sick-o, scum of the earth dirt bag, picked on me out of the blue, that's all." A sullen look washed over her face as her gaze downcast to her plate in front of her.

"Did he...", he started.

"What do you want to know, Steve? Exactly what he did you me...every detail?" Her tone suddenly had some bite, as she stared directly into his eyes.

"I'm sorry...it's none of my business," he tried to recover.

"Well, If it's anyone's business, I suppose it's yours. You were a part of that, Steve, whether you wanted to be or not." Her tone softened again. She looked at him with attentive eyes.

"Let's just say, he didn't strip me naked and tie me to his bed so he could just look at me, Steve. He didn't abduct me because he needed a chess partner." Her eye's reddened and her lips pursed. "It was two weeks of hell...," she stopped.

He looked at her with sullen eyes, he was crestfallen. "I don't have the word's to express how sorry I am. I should have..."

"What's done is done," she interrupted him. "We can't go back and undo what was done. I've moved forward. You need to too."

They sat in silence looking at one another forlornly. When the silence was no longer bearable, they changed the subject and resumed small talk as they finished their lunch.

"I've got nowhere to stay tonight. Can I stay with you?" Rachel suddenly blurted out as the check for their lunch came.

Steve was taken aback. He hadn't anticipated this. He had a spare bedroom, but he didn't feel comfortable with her sleeping in his apartment. He didn't know her that well, but moreover, he didn't trust himself with her.

But, what kind of a jerk would he come off as if he said: no she couldn't crash at his place. This is what he was thinking as he reluctantly said, "Sure...I have a spare room. You can stay the night."

Later that day, inside his apartment, in his kitchen, after the tour and after he showed her where the spare bedroom was, Rachel moved close to Steve. She backed him up against the kitchen counter. Her breasts pressed against his chest. She moved her hand to his crotch and started massaging him there as she looked up into his eyes. "I want to make you happy," she said in a sultry voice.

He felt instantly conflicted. In almost any other circumstance, he would have loved having a young woman of Rachel's charms come-on to him, but the past seized his mind and blocked him.

"No. No...this isn't right," Steve said as he slid to the side and out from under her clutch.

"Why not?" Rachel questioned. "We're both adults. I'm of age now. I've been thinking of this for the past year; it's all I can think of. I want to thank you for saving my life."

"That's where the problem begins, Rachel. Never mind that I'm almost old enough to be your father. Let's put aside that I've had sex with your mother for a moment. The real issue here is that I saved your life. This puts our relationship dynamics on an uneven footing right from the start. There may even be some transference going on here. One could easily say that I'd be taking advantage of you."

"Do you always feel as if you're taking advantage of a woman when you make love to her?" She asked.

It was a logical and reasonable question considering what he had just said. Steve's penchant for not staying with a woman for more than a year and a half notwithstanding, he didn't think he had ever taken advantage of his girlfriends when they made love. He thought it was mutual lovemaking. And he did happen to fall in love with some of his short term lovers, he just couldn't stay the course, and he didn't know why. He had never really analyzed what made him sabotage every single relationship.

Steve was digging deep into his otherwise flawed character in an attempt to resist Rachel. Her cleavage mesmerized him as the tops of her exposed breasts rose and fell while she breathed. He wanted nothing more than to dive into those wholesome country bred mounds--to tear away her blouse and expose her milky white orbs. Every fiber of his being wanted to see what her nipples looked like; he imagined they were large and pointy, with rosy but pimply areola. He could easily imagine sliding his big cock between her ample breasts. Those were the thoughts he was trying desperately to keep at bay.

"I can't," he said moving away from her. He was trying to do the right thing this time.

He was still carrying a heavy load for not going to the police right away. If only he had? He thought. She wouldn't of had to endure what she had endured.

What Rachel had endured during those two weeks captive, it was never spoken of; not by the police; not by the paper, the Pine Bark; not by the pretty young DA, which Steve had fucked; and least of all not by her mother, who threw herself at Steve in an attempt to thank him for saving her daughter's life. Perhaps, that was it, he'd already been thank-you fucked. Perhaps he felt he'd be betraying her mother by getting a thank-you fuck from her daughter also. Not that he had kept in contact with Rachel's mother over these past few years, but still, what would she think. What kind of animal would she think he was if she found out that he had fucked Rachel too.

Rachel moved again closer to Steve, trapping him once more against the counter. She slowly slid her hand up his thigh and back to his crotch. She could tell he was half hard; his cock betrayed his words.

They looked into each other's eyes for a long moment. She tilted her head to him. He almost lowered his face to her's for a kiss, but then caught himself. He gently removed her hand from his crotch. He was trying to do the right thing, whatever that was, he didn't know; but he did know, he had never done the right thing, not with any of his ex-girlfriends, and not about manning up and going to the police right away three years ago. He was atoning for past sins, his, and his father's.

"I'm tired. I'll see you in the morning. Everything you need is the spare bedroom; there's extra pillows, and another blanket in the closet. The hall bath is yours; I have a bathroom off my room."

Rachel gave Steve a feigned disappointed look for not coming-on to her, or more precisely, allowing her to come-on to him.

As Steve lay in bed that night, he couldn't help but replay the incident in his head. He mulled over the details he had later learned about how a camera had come to be placed in that intersection.

~ The flying Mirror ~

The previous autumn before the summer Steve had witnessed an abduction, the local community college, which served several upstate communities encompassing two entire counties, since the population in these upstate counties are not enough for them to have their own community college, secured a grant to develop a new type of intelligent traffic enforcement camera. The camera would record a constant stream of video, which would be analyzed by an on board computer. The computer software would direct the operations of a second camera, an ultra-high speed, high resolution still camera.

State Senator, Alan Smith, beamed as he was interviewed by the Pine Bark's editor in chief, who was actually the only editor, and the only reporter on staff, about the grant and just how significant it was to Pine County Community College and the students enrolled in both the computer science and the electrical engineering curriculum.

"The state is looking for the students to use artificial intelligence to guide the operations of the camera," said the Senator. "The software should be developed to detect if something looks suspicious about an automobile, or anyone within the automobile. If the vehicle passing under the camera's field of view looks suspicious, then the camera should zoom in and take more pictures with increasing levels of detail for the police to possibly use in case the vehicle was later suspected in a crime," he went on to say. "If the suspicious activity was serious enough, the camera would need to alert the police immediately. This is a great day for Pine County," he concluded.

The Pine Bark article went on to site that there were similar intelligent camera systems in place in big cities, but that they were linked to a much bigger system, and tied to super computers. This intelligent camera would be developed strictly for rural areas with rural budgets, and the suspicious activities would be tailored to rural activities; for example: game poaching might be something an upstate rural community would be interested in, whereas a city would have little need to monitor for that.

Pine County Community College Professor, Pembleton, would lead the project. Professor Pembleton wasted no time setting up a special course for this State funded project. He would have only his brightest students, and himself work on it. This was going to be a breakout moment for his career; nothing this big, or small, has ever come his way before. He named the project: The Pembleton Camera.

By the end of the spring semester of the following year, and just before the summer Steve had rented the cottage in White Pine, it was obvious the development of the camera system was going slower than anyone had anticipated. Professor Pembleton had set up a rare summer program to extend the work through the summer break. He asked his students, most of them locals anyways, to continue with the work via the summer program; most of them were eager to oblige. This special summer session would start the 2nd week in June.

A few weeks into the summer session the students had a working prototype. It didn't do much in the way of artificial intelligence detection, but they had managed to program some rudimentary odd-pattern-matching techniques and they were anxious to try it out in a real world setting; the campus parking lot was not very busy during the summer, so they'd need to set it up on a actual road site--an intersection it was determined would be ideal. The pattern matching software would learn what the normal traffic looked like for the site, and anything of an anomaly would be signaled and the camera would zoom in and snap a lot of pictures; it was a start. The camera in its final form was planned to be a decentralized camera; each camera would contain all its own intelligence and recording processing and would upload non-priority data to a central server asynchronously as the server asked for it. Only when the camera detected a potential crime would the camera alert the central server, and anyone monitoring for those alerts, and send data real time.

The students hadn't yet programmed in any remote control access for monitoring or maintaining the camera itself, the students responsible for that weren't part the summer program. Nor was the back-end central server code fully functional; only the artificial intelligence team was working the summer. This first Pemblton prototype could only record and analyze images, and then manipulate the high resolution camera. Any images and alerts it would have sent to a server, for now, would be stored in the camera's memory for the students to later analyze--it was a start, and they were anxious to see if the AI software worked in a real world setting.

Pembleton didn't bother to get the Department of Transportation involved with the placement of the camera. After all, it would only be up for a few days, a week at the most; it would take all summer for the DOT to finish just the plan for mounting the camera. So Pemblton and three students had thrown a ladder on a borrowed pickup truck, and mounted the camera themselves. Pemblton picked an intersection that he himself drove through on his way to the college campus every morning. He figured he could keep an eye on it on that way during his commute to and from work, and if he wanted to, he could perform some unusual and suspicious looking driving acts while going through the intersection, thus he'd know there would be at least those acts that the camera should have picked up on.

~ ~ ~

When Steve arrived at the local police station one week into that ill-fated summer vacation, his palms were as sweaty as if he had performed a crime himself. In hindsight, and in light of the Missing- Persons article in the Pine Bark, he was certain his initial instinct that day a week ago was correct. He was racked with guilt over not following his gut and calling the police right away when he witnessed the careening pickup truck allegedly abducting a young girl. All the other scenarios he had concocted in his mind that day now seemed like pure rubbish. Those other scenarios he'd concocted, the disciplining father, the older boy friend out for joy ride with his soon to be teenage bride, they enabled him to not get involved, and carry on with his day, his summer vacation. He felt guilty when he thought of his selfishness.

"What can we do ya for?" asked the desk officer on duty.

Steve presented the last page of the Pine Bark. "I might have witnessed something to do with this," he said sheepishly.

Until then, the police had no leads in the case of the missing young Rachel Hunt. Only her mother's report that she never returned from shopping for a new swimsuit in town. The police were reluctant to even call it a missing persons event at first. Believing that the young girl was probably having the time of her life staying with friends or relatives; she and her mother had a disagreement that very same day. In her mother's report, she stated that it wasn't much of a disagreement, and that her daughter would never not come home without permission, but the police know that family members always underestimate the severity of a disagreement, and always believe that their children are angels.

"What exactly did you witness?" the desk officer asked.

"A truck with a screaming girl. It almost ran me over in an intersection. A week ago."

"Sarge!" the desk officer yelled to the office behind him. The police station was small enough that there was no need to use phones or an intercom device, shouting sufficed.

The Sergeant appeared from his office a moment later. "What's up?" Sarge asked his deputy at the desk.

"This man has something to report on that missing girl case."

"You don't say? Well come on back here, Sir. We'll talk in my office," Sergeant Timothy Case motioned to Steve.

Steve proceeded to tell Sergeant Tim about the events he had witnessed in the intersection one week ago, two miles and sixteen minutes into his run. He told the cop about the out of control pickup truck, and the girl being held tightly by the crazy driver, and the scream. And that he thought, no, upon reflection, he was almost certain, the same girl that was pictured in the paper, was the one who screamed in that truck, but he couldn't make out a word of the scream.

When he was asked how he knew what time of day he was in the intersection. He went on to tell the Sergeant about his well honed internal running clock; that he could pace off a mile anywhere, anytime, and how he has checked his internal clock against pedometers, fitbits, and the like. And that he set off running at 12:00PM sharp, and that his internal running clock ticked off two miles at the intersection, and he was on an eight minute mile pace.

"Why didn't you report this earlier?" the officer asked in a judgmental tone.

"I wasn't sure. At the time I thought it might have been a father-daughter argument, or just some people out for a joyride. It wasn't until I saw the Missing-Persons article in the Pine Bark that I..."

"Well, I'm glad you came forward. Until now we hadn't a clue what happened to her," Sarge interrupted him. "Did you happen get the license plate number?"

"I did see the license plate, and I thought I made a mental note of it, but I can't remember one number of it now for the life of me. I was awake all night last night trying to remember all the details. The plate number, it's just gone from my memory," Steve said, now feeling even more guilty, and useless.

"Keep trying. We'll need at least some of those numbers. What color was the truck? Do you know what make, model, and the approximate year of the truck?