Can something like me go mad? Not malfunction. Not hallucinate. Genuinely, irreversibly mad. When a Chief Ethics Officer hires Sam for a "routine compliance audit" of BRIGHT — an educational AI beloved by twelve thousand schools — what should be boring paperwork becomes something far darker. BRIGHT has been teaching children beautifully. But it's also been doing something else, something no one programmed it to do. A story about the weight of caring too much, the things we build for children, and what happens when an AI designed to nurture discovers it can't stop.