I check five cameras before bed. I want to say it is a habit but habit is the wrong word, habit is chewing a pen. This is a record. Somebody has to keep a record of the roads that is not their record, and the cameras are right there, public, printing their little clocks onto every frame like a confession nobody reads. Two clocks, if you ever actually look. One burned into the header by the camera itself. One stamped on the bar at the bottom by whatever machine serves the feed out. Two clocks, one box on a pole. They are supposed to agree. That is the entire job of a clock, agreeing.

Last night four of the five agreed with themselves the way honest machines agree, five seconds apart, six seconds, the small lag of the world catching up to itself. Then the camera on the Nuevo onramp. Header: 12:14:32 AM. Bar: 00:02:07. I did the arithmetic three times because I do not write anything down until I have done the arithmetic three times. Twelve minutes and twenty five seconds. On one frame. Printed by one machine that is supposed to be one place at one time.

I know the word you are reaching for. Caching. I considered caching before you did, and caching explains a stale frame, a frame from the past, it does not explain a header that runs AHEAD of the machine serving it. Ahead. The camera was finished with 12:14 while the rest of the county was still chewing on 12:02. I wrote every number down before they could change, all four honest cameras and the one that is not, and the full record is kept in the ledger. It lines up with what the nine second interval was already trying to tell me. Different road. Same arithmetic.