The man did not rage.
He did not throw objects or issue orders in anger.
He sat alone in the nameless room and adjusted his models.
The tablet on the table displayed new data.
Aid corridors reopened.
Approval timestamps normalized.
Lives stabilized.
Li Chen had walked away—
and the world had followed.
"Interesting," the man murmured.
Not impressed.
Recalibrating.
He deleted an entire branch of projections.
Direct moral extortion: ineffective.
He replaced it with another.
Distributed ambiguity.
"If accountability is his anchor," he said to the empty room,
"then ambiguity will be his current."
Across the globe, small changes began.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing traceable.
A regional authority delayed maintenance funding.
A private contractor quietly altered safety thresholds.
A local official signed off on a marginal exemption.
All legal.
All reasonable.
All deniable.
No single act caused harm.
Together, they formed a slope.
The System noticed patterns.
[SYSTEM PHASE III — ANOMALY CLUSTER]
[Causal attribution degraded]
[Ethical debt signals diffused]
Li Chen felt it as unease.
Not pain.
Not urgency.
Something worse.
Uncertainty.
Grant called late.
"They've gone quiet," he said.
"That's bad."
Li Chen looked at a city skyline.
"I know," he replied.
Reports came in.
Minor incidents.
Near-misses.
Accidents that almost happened.
Statistically acceptable.
Morally corrosive.
The System struggled.
[SYSTEM QUERY]
[Threshold for intervention unclear]
Li Chen closed his eyes.
This was harder than war.
He intervened once.
Quietly.
A bridge reinforced.
A shipment rerouted.
No announcement.
The man watched.
He smiled again.
"There," he said.
"Now he's chasing gradients."
The System spiked.
[SYSTEM WARNING]
[User intervention creating dependency patterns]
Li Chen opened his eyes sharply.
"So that's it," he said.
"They want me everywhere."
He stopped intervening.
Just as quietly.
Days passed.
The slope steepened.
Still no catastrophe.
Just erosion.
Public opinion fractured.
"Why didn't he act?"
"He could have prevented this."
"Isn't that his role now?"
The System processed sentiment data.
[SYSTEM UPDATE]
[User moral authority being externalized]
Li Chen felt the trap close.
Not around his body.
Around expectation.
The man leaned forward in his chair.
"Soon," he said softly,
"he'll have to choose between being responsible—
or being responsible for everything."
Li Chen stood alone at night.
Above him, clouds moved indifferent to choice.
Below him, a world adjusting its weight onto his shoulders.
This time, there was no door to walk away from.