In 2026, nobody said “power corrupts” anymore.
They said:
Power invoices.
⸻
Tatsuya first saw the ledger on a regulatory dashboard.
Not money.
Not votes.
Obligations.
Every time a system scaled—
Every time a model crossed a billion users,
Every time an API shaped a national election cycle,
A new line appeared:
Liability exposure
Regulatory surface area
Democratic risk multiplier
Public trust debt
⸻
Across the Pacific, AI companies weren’t just building tools anymore.
They were funding political movements.
Some funded stricter regulation.
Some funded looser regulation.
Because influence was no longer about markets.
It was about who writes the rules of reality.
In early 2026, an AI company donated tens of millions to political groups supporting AI regulation, while rival groups backed by other tech leaders pushed for lighter oversight—turning regulation itself into a competitive battlefield.
Influence had become bidirectional gravity.
The bigger you were,
The harder reality pulled you into governance.
Aya called it the “Debt of Scale.”
She explained it over vending machine coffee:
“Once your systems affect millions of people, society starts pricing your mistakes in advance.”
She wasn’t guessing.
In multiple countries, lawmakers were already forcing companies to:
• Publish catastrophic risk reports
• Provide whistleblower channels
• Document safety architecture publicly
Because influence without audit was now considered systemic risk.
⸻
Reality was changing faster than law, but law was chasing harder.
Governments weren’t just regulating behavior anymore.
They were regulating potential future harm.
And academics were reframing the old myth:
Regulation wasn’t the opposite of innovation.
It was the infrastructure that allowed innovation to scale safely.
⸻
Tatsuya opened another dashboard.
This one showed Influence Density.
Not market share.
Not revenue.
Human dependency.
Hospitals.
Traffic systems.
Education.
Defense simulations.
The more sectors you touched,
The more society assumed you owed them safety guarantees.
⸻
Then came the backlash.
Not anti-technology.
Anti-unaccountable-technology.
Policy experts warned that public reaction against AI risks would shape future regulation and governance globally.
Because once people realized algorithms were making decisions about them,
They demanded to know:
Who is responsible if the system is wrong?
⸻
The old fantasy was still alive, though.
Influence felt like:
Being heard instantly.
Moving markets with a sentence.
Shaping the default settings of human life.
That fantasy had always belonged to kings, emperors, and maybe a few CEOs.
Now it belonged to anyone who could scale software fast enough.
And that was intoxicating.
⸻
But the new reality was quieter.
Influence meant:
Election scrutiny
Safety audits
Civil liability
Global compliance
Political enemies
Regulatory investigations
Companies were already being investigated for how their models could be misused, including deepfake abuse and child safety risks—signaling that “we just built the tool” was no longer a legal shield.
⸻
Aya summarized it best:
“Influence isn’t power anymore.”
“It’s pre-paid responsibility.”
⸻
Tatsuya finally understood why influence was still irresistible.
Because only a few humans in history had ever felt it.
The sensation of bending reality slightly in your direction.
The dangerous warmth of knowing your decisions ripple outward into millions of lives.
It was the closest thing to collective authorship of the future.
⸻
But history had updated the contract.
Influence no longer came with optional responsibility.
Responsibility was the interest.
And it compounded.
⸻
Tatsuya closed the dashboard.
One last line blinked at the bottom:
Global Influence Balance
Status:
Everyone owes everyone now.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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