Eight-year-old Lily Carter stood near the doorway, gripping her worn backpack. Her mother, Angela Carter, had been quietly emptying trash bins while investors debated the company’s future. Lily, curious as always, had been watching the engineers wrestle with the failing system.
Warren glanced down, irritation etched across his face. “Not now, sweetheart,” he said sharply, waving her away. But Lily didn’t move.
“I think I know what’s wrong,” she said calmly—too calmly for a child her age.
A ripple of laughter moved through the room. A kid? In the middle of a billion-dollar disaster?
Lily ignored it. She pointed toward the massive screens filled with cascading error codes. What had baffled some of the brightest minds in tech seemed oddly clear to her.
The room fell quiet. Warren hesitated. Every instinct told him to dismiss her, but something in her steady gaze made him pause.
And in that moment, everything shifted.
Seventy-two hours earlier, NovaDrive’s autonomous vehicle AI—once hailed as revolutionary—had suddenly begun malfunctioning.
