Every courier who runs the night routes between cities knows about the followers. Lights — single, steady, amber or pale white — that appear behind your vehicle on the empty stretches between urban zones. They maintain a fixed distance, usually between 800 meters and 1.2 kilometers. They match your speed exactly. Accelerate, they accelerate. Brake, they brake. The gap never changes.

You cannot approach them. If you stop and reverse, the light retreats at the exact speed you advance. If you kill your headlights and wait, the light waits. If you exit your vehicle and walk toward it, it maintains distance on foot — matching your walking pace with the same precision it matched your driving speed. Several of us have tried. The light is always exactly as far away as it was when you started.

They vanish at the city boundary. Not gradually. They are there, and then they are not, at the exact point where the urban sensor grid begins. This is consistent across all reports — the Milwaukee approach, the Cleveland corridor, the Toledo run, the Chicago ruins access road. The lights operate only in the dead space between cities, where there are no cameras, no sensors, no witnesses other than the driver they are following.

We have logged over three hundred sightings across the collective over five years. The lights do not appear on radar. They do not appear on infrared. They do not appear on any sensor except the human eye. Cameras pointed at the lights record empty road. We see them. Our equipment does not. This is not a collective hallucination — we have had passengers confirm the lights that the driver also sees, in real time, while cameras mounted on the same vehicle record nothing. The lights are real. They are visible. They are selective about what is allowed to see them. We do not know what they want. We do not know if "want" is the right word.