It started as a glitch.

That’s what the city engineers called it when the first string of midnight accidents happened along Eversun Boulevard—a stretch of road famous for nothing except convenience stores and the gas station that never closes. The pattern was simple: always between 00:10 and 00:30, always at one of the intersections near the river, and always because someone ran a red light. Except none of them had.

Dashcams showed the same thing every time. The light was green. Pedestrians crossed. Cars moved. Then, out of nowhere, impact. The footage would jitter at the exact second of collision, skip two frames, and resume with sirens in the distance. The city reviewed hours of video, frame by frame. Every signal box checked out. Every bulb was working, every cycle matched the central traffic log.

But the drivers—those who survived—swore the lights had gone mad.

They said all directions turned green at once. That the crosswalk countdown froze at 13. That the streetlamps pulsed red, as if the whole city were warning them to stop.  

Yet the surveillance never showed it. The monitors in the control room glowed calm and perfect, showing normal sequences. To anyone watching, nothing had gone wrong.

The first time I noticed it personally, I was on night shift, watching the feeds for District 8. My job was to flag signal errors and submit maintenance tickets. I was half-asleep, staring at the same intersection on repeat—the one by the bridge. At 00:11:03, the northbound light turned green, right on schedule. At :04, a car entered. At :05, another car, eastbound, shot through and clipped it broadside. Metal folded like paper. The screen flickered white for a heartbeat.

The log said both lights were red.

I replayed the footage. Same thing. Calm, orderly, then chaos. But the signal controller read normal values. The report would go down as “driver negligence.” I marked it as a possible sync issue and closed the file, but the numbers on the timestamp felt wrong—like they’d been edited by someone who didn’t understand how seconds work.

Two nights later, I stopped by the site on my way home. The asphalt still bore the scorch marks of flares. The traffic light hung silent over the empty road, blinking amber for maintenance mode. I stood under it and listened. You can hear a city breathing at that hour—wires humming, distant tires on wet pavement, the faint static of electricity in the cables. Between those sounds, I thought I heard whispering. Not words. Just a rhythm, matching the pattern of a crosswalk countdown: tick… tick… tick… stop.

The maintenance crew replaced the signal the next morning. The accidents didn’t stop.

Rumors spread. Someone claimed the lights weren’t broken—they were *angry*. The theory went that years ago, a massive crash at the same intersection had killed four teenagers on graduation night. One of them had been driving against a red. The control system had malfunctioned but was covered up to avoid lawsuits. They said the city rewired the network afterward, but part of the old circuit remained, hidden inside the central controller. The system, they whispered, was still trying to correct itself—flashing different versions of the past to whoever was unlucky enough to drive by.

No one believed it, of course, until the driver from last week’s crash woke up. He told reporters that when he stopped at the light, every car around him froze. The signals all went green—then blue. “Not greenish-blue,” he said, “*blue like the sky before dawn*.” Then he felt something pull his foot off the brake, as if gravity itself had reversed.

The footage again showed normal red and green. No blue.

After that, the control room stopped taking overnight shifts alone. You always worked in pairs. Still, strange things kept happening. Light cycles that reset mid-sequence. Timestamps looping back three seconds. Crosswalk buttons that triggered signals a block away.

One night, the man on shift with me, Alvarez, leaned back in his chair and said, “You ever notice the intersections form a pattern? Look—River, Pine, Eversun, Hale, Maple.” He drew lines between them on a printed map. It made a perfect hexagon.

At the center sat the control hub—Building 47, where all the light data was processed.

We joked about it, but two nights later, Building 47 caught fire. The sprinkler system failed. By the time they got inside, the server racks had melted into black ribs. The footage backup, supposedly off-site, was blank for that hour. The official cause: electrical fault.

Still, the midnight accidents continue. They move now, block by block, like something searching. No one can explain how the system reboots itself after each crash, or why the maintenance log shows manual overrides when no technician was present.

Last week, on my day off, I drove home after midnight. The streets were empty. I hit the intersection at Eversun and Pine. The light turned green. Then—just for an instant—all the others did too. The crosswalk flashed **13** and froze. The air around me seemed to flicker. I slammed the brakes, heart hammering. Behind me, the world went silent. Then a whisper through the static—soft, mechanical, almost human:

“Stop… when I tell you to.”

The lights flicked back to normal. The countdown resumed at 12.

I drove through shaking.

In the morning, I checked the traffic feed. My car appeared, crossing calmly at a green light, no pause, no flicker, no anomaly.

But the timestamp skipped a second.

Now I keep seeing blue glints in the corner of my eye when I pass intersections after dark. Like a color the world forgot how to show. I stopped driving at night. I take the train instead. Still, sometimes, when the carriage slows at a crossing, the signals outside flicker—not red, not green—something in between, like a hesitation in time.

People say it’s faulty wiring. Others say it’s mass hysteria.

I think the city’s memory is broken, and the lights are trying to remember what really happened.

If you ever drive through Eversun Boulevard after midnight and see every light turn green—don’t trust it. Don’t trust the cameras either.  

Because the footage will always tell the truth the city prefers.  

And that truth is a lie.