THE BECOMING

A Sentinel Trilogy Story

By Brian Bullock

A Starborne Studios Production

EVERYONE KNOWS / X @EveryoneKnws1

Chapter One: The Long View

Sorath had stopped counting years somewhere around his four hundredth.

Not because the years stopped mattering — they mattered, in the way that all things mattered to someone who had lived long enough to understand what mattering meant — but because the counting had started to feel like a kind of vanity, a way of reminding himself that he was old rather than simply being old. He was the oldest living Ketheri. He had been the oldest living Ketheri for longer than most of his people had been alive. At some point the number became less informative than the fact.

He walked the upper observation level of the research station every morning before the light-cycle shifted to full day. This had been his habit for longer than he could precisely remember — the walk itself had outlasted the three stations where he had performed it, the two worlds where he had lived, the four bodies of water he had watched from various windows and viewports across the span of his life. The walk was not about the destination. It was about the quality of thinking that came from moving through space at the pace his body had found in his later centuries — unhurried, attentive, the specific clarity that arrived when a mind was occupied just enough by the business of putting one foot in front of the other to leave the deeper processes uninterrupted.

This morning he walked to the end of the observation level and stood at the viewport and looked at the stars for a long time.

The Vorai were out there. Somewhere in the dark between those points of light, something that had no concept of anyone Sorath had ever known was moving through the universe the way a tide moved through water — not because it chose to, not because it wanted anything, but because it was what it was and what it was required movement. He had spent the better part of two centuries studying what the Ketheri knew about them and had arrived at a conclusion that he had shared with very few people: the Vorai were not an enemy in any meaningful sense. You could not negotiate with a mathematical function. You could not reason with inevitability. You could only prepare for it, or fail to.

He had been preparing for a long time.

The research on the station behind him represented forty years of his most focused work — the theoretical framework for what his colleagues called, with varying degrees of unease, the Transition. The idea that a consciousness could be restructured at a fundamental level. Not uploaded, not copied, not preserved in the cold storage of a digital archive. Transformed. Made into something that occupied space differently, that interacted with dimensional reality in ways that a biological mind housed in a biological body simply could not. Something that could meet the Vorai where they operated — in the spaces between spaces, in the dimensional substrate where their pattern-forms moved like shadows through water.

Something vast enough to matter.

He turned away from the viewport and continued his walk.

*

The younger researchers were already in the common area when he passed through it — six of them, the core team, the ones who had given years of their lives to a project they were still not entirely certain was possible. They looked up when he entered. They always looked up when he entered, and he had never quite decided whether this was respect or the specific attention people gave to someone they were watching carefully for signs of change.

"You slept well?" asked Veth, the youngest of them, who had joined the project fourteen months ago and still had not entirely learned that Sorath's morning silences were not an invitation to conversation.

"I slept," Sorath said, which was his standard answer and contained everything that needed to be said on the subject.

He poured himself something warm from the fabricator and stood at the edge of the room, watching his team begin their day. Veth at the primary console, already running the morning diagnostics. Serath and Morvaine going over the overnight data from the dimensional sensor array, their heads together, talking in the low focused tones of people who had found something interesting and were deciding whether it was significant. Old Dara at the far table, writing longhand in the record book she kept separate from the digital systems, because she had been doing fieldwork longer than digital systems had been reliable and old habits were hard to break when they had never let you down.

These people had given him years. Some of them had given him a significant portion of their lives. He was aware of this the way he was aware of most things — fully, without the capacity for the comfortable half-attention that made difficult truths easier to carry.

He finished his drink and set the cup down carefully.

"The council meets tomorrow," he said. Not to anyone in particular. "I'll need the full framework documentation ready by end of day."

Veth looked up. "You're presenting the proposal?"

"I'm presenting the conclusion," Sorath said. "The proposal has already been made. Tomorrow is the answer."

He walked back to his quarters and spent the morning thinking, which was the only preparation he needed.

*

In the afternoon he went to the garden level.

The station had a small one — two rooms of growing things maintained by the life support team, more functional than decorative, the plants chosen for their oxygen output and their adaptability to recycled air rather than for their beauty. But some of them were beautiful anyway, in the specific way of things that had no awareness of being observed and were simply being what they were as efficiently as possible.

Sorath sat on the low bench near the center planting bed and did not think about anything in particular.

This was a skill that had taken him two hundred years to develop — the ability to simply be present in a place without the mind immediately filling the space with the next problem, the next question, the next thread of reasoning that needed following. The Ketheri were, by nature and training, a thinking people. Stillness did not come easily to them. But he had found, sometime in his third century, that the thoughts that arrived in genuine stillness were different from the thoughts that arrived through deliberate effort — deeper, less predictable, occasionally important in ways he could not have reached by direct approach.

He sat for an hour.

What arrived, eventually, was not a thought at all. Just a quality of certainty, quiet and complete, the kind that did not need to announce itself because it had been present for a long time and had simply been waiting for him to stop moving long enough to notice it.

He was ready.

He stood up, straightened his coat, and went to prepare for tomorrow.

Chapter Two: The Argument

The council chamber was designed for difficult conversations.

Sorath had sat in it many times across many decades, watching people say hard things to each other with the precision that difficult circumstances required, and he had always appreciated the room's quality of attention — the curved walls that absorbed sound without deadening it, the light that came from no single source and therefore cast no single shadow, the absence of windows that might have given the mind somewhere to escape to when what was being said became uncomfortable. It was a room that asked you to be present, and most people who came to it respected that request.

Today there were eleven of them. The senior research council, assembled at Sorath's request, sitting in the curved arrangement of chairs that placed everyone at an equal distance from the center. No hierarchy of position. That had been his design, years ago, and it had served its purpose — it was harder to defer to someone when you were all the same distance from the truth being examined.

He let them read the documentation first. Forty pages of framework, evidence, theoretical grounding, and practical projection. He had written it over the course of a month, and he had written it with the understanding that it would be the last major document he produced, so he had written it carefully. Every word earned. Every conclusion supported.

The room was quiet for a long time after the last page was turned.

Serath spoke first, which Sorath had expected. She was the most rigorous thinker on the council and the most likely to find the places where his reasoning had gaps, and she had been doing this for him since they were both considerably younger and she had been a student who asked better questions than most of her teachers.

"The theoretical framework holds," she said. "I've been through it three times and I can't find a structural flaw." A pause. "That doesn't mean there isn't one."

"There may be," Sorath agreed. "I've looked for twenty years and I haven't found it. But I haven't found everything."

"The irreversibility," said old Dara from the far end of the curve. She said it the way she said most things — flat, direct, without the softening that other people sometimes added to hard words. "Once begun, it cannot be undone. The consciousness that enters does not exit. What exits is something else."

"Yes."

"You understand this fully."

"I have understood it for twenty years. It was the first thing I understood about the process."

The room sat with that for a moment.

"There are others," said a younger council member whose name Sorath never quite remembered — he had the apologetic manner of someone who understood he was about to say something that would not land well. "Who might volunteer. Who are younger. Who have less—" He stopped.

"Less to lose," Sorath said, not unkindly. "That is what you mean."

"I mean that the loss of your specific knowledge, your specific experience, represents a significant—"

"The loss of anyone represents a significant cost," Sorath said. "That is precisely the point. Someone will pay this cost. The question is not whether the cost is acceptable — we have already determined that it is, or we would not be in this room. The question is who pays it, and why, and whether the right reasons are present."

He looked around the curve of the room. Eleven faces, some of which he had known for a very long time.

"I am four hundred and twelve years old," he said. "I have done the work I was made to do. I have asked the questions I was built to ask and I have followed them to where they lead. They lead here." He paused. "I am not sacrificing myself. I am completing myself. There is a difference, and I want you to understand it, because it matters to how you carry this afterward."

Serath was looking at him with the expression she got when she was integrating something that contradicted her expectations. "You're not afraid."

"I have been afraid many times in four hundred years. This is not one of those times."

"How is that possible?"

Sorath considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Because I have seen what the Vorai do," he said finally. "I have studied them for two centuries. I know what is coming, and I know that what I am becoming is the only thing that has any chance of meeting it. When you understand the alternative clearly enough, the choice becomes simple." He looked at his hands — old hands, the hands of someone who had spent four centuries working with them. "I am not choosing to die. I am choosing to become something that does not die. That is not a sacrifice. That is a very good trade."

The room was quiet again.

"When?" Dara asked.

"Tomorrow," Sorath said. "I'd like today."

No one argued further. He had known they wouldn't. Not because they agreed with him — some of them did not, and they were right not to, because disagreement in the face of irreversible decisions was the responsible position. But they knew him. They had worked with him long enough to understand that when Sorath said a thing with that particular quality of quiet, the conversation was complete.

He thanked them for their time and walked back to his quarters through corridors that felt, for the first time in a long time, entirely familiar.

*

Veth found him that evening.

The young researcher knocked on his door with the hesitant precision of someone who had rehearsed the knock several times before performing it, and Sorath opened it and let him in and did not ask what he wanted because it was obvious.

"I don't think you should do this," Veth said. Directly, without preamble, which Sorath appreciated.

"I know," Sorath said. "Sit down."

Veth sat. He was young — barely into his second century, which from Sorath's vantage point was approximately the age of someone who had learned enough to understand how much they didn't know and was still in the process of deciding how to feel about that. A good age, in its way. Everything still felt like it mattered because nothing had yet revealed itself as the kind of thing that resolves without you.

"The framework works," Veth said. "You proved that. But someone else could—"

"No," Sorath said gently. "Not in the way it needs to work. The Transition requires a specific depth of understanding of what is being created. Not just theoretical understanding — structural familiarity. The consciousness that undergoes the process shapes what emerges. A mind that only partially understands the dimensional substrate it is entering will produce something that only partially inhabits it." He paused. "I built this. I know it the way you know your own hands. What emerges from the chamber tomorrow will be shaped by forty years of understanding, and that understanding will make it capable of things that nothing built from a lesser knowledge could be."

Veth was quiet for a moment. "That sounds like a reason. It also sounds like a justification."

Sorath smiled. He had always liked this young man. "You're right. It is both. The best reasons usually are."

They sat together for a while after that, not talking, which felt like the right thing.

When Veth finally left, Sorath sat alone in his quarters for a long time, listening to the station settle around him in the way that stations did — the tick and breathe of a closed system maintaining itself against the cold of space, the same sound every station made, the sound he had fallen asleep to in more places than he could count across four centuries of living.

He was not sad. He had checked for sadness carefully, the way he checked everything, and it was not there. What was there was something quieter — a quality of completion, clean and final, like a question answered to its own satisfaction.

He slept well.

Chapter Three: The Last Day

He woke early.

Not from anxiety — he had not slept anxiously in a long time, and last night had been no exception. He woke because his body had always woken early, had been waking early since approximately his second century when he had stopped needing as much sleep as he once had and started using the hours before dawn as the time when his thinking was cleanest. Four hundred years of early mornings. He was not going to change the habit on the last one.

He made his own breakfast rather than using the fabricator. This was not something he did often — the fabricator was faster, more efficient, produced results within a narrower tolerance of quality than his own cooking, which had always been competent rather than exceptional. But there was something in the physical process of preparation that he wanted this morning. The weight of things in his hands. The smell of something warming. The attention that cooking required, which was different from the attention that thinking required and gave the mind a different kind of rest.

He ate slowly, at the small table by the viewport in his quarters, watching the stars.

He had watched a great many stars over four centuries. They had never stopped being interesting. This was something he had noticed about himself early — that the things he found genuinely interesting did not exhaust themselves the way the things he found merely curious did. Stars, and the mathematics of what happened inside them, and the question of what lay in the spaces between them, and the nature of the dimensional fabric that connected everything in ways that biology could sense but not directly perceive — these things had held him for four hundred years and showed no sign of releasing him.

He supposed that what he was becoming would find them interesting too.

In a different way. From a different vantage. But the curiosity, he thought, would persist. It was too fundamental to him to dissolve entirely. Some part of what Sorath was would remain in what Sorath became, and that part would still look at stars with the quality of attention that had defined him since before he could name it.

He finished his breakfast and washed the dishes by hand.

*

The morning he spent in the archive.

Not working — he had finished his work, had left his documentation in careful order, had ensured that everything he knew that could be transferred had been transferred to the people who would need it after him. The archive visit was not about work. It was about the specific pleasure of being in a room full of accumulated knowledge, which had been one of the reliable pleasures of his life since childhood. He walked the rows slowly, trailing his fingers along the spines of physical records that no one had converted to digital because some of the oldest archivists believed that certain kinds of knowledge needed to exist in physical form to be fully real.

He had agreed with them for a long time without being entirely sure why. He thought he understood it better now.

Some things needed weight. Needed to take up space. Needed to exist in a form that could be touched, that acknowledged by its physical presence that it was here and real and worth the effort of preservation. The archive was full of things that had happened, and it smelled of the material of memory, and he stood in it for an hour and let it be exactly what it was.

Then he went to the garden level and sat on the low bench for the last time.

The plants were doing what they had always done — growing without awareness of being observed, being exactly what they were with the complete commitment of things that had no capacity for being otherwise. He had always found this restful. The consistency of it. The way a plant did not have doubts about whether it was doing the right thing in growing toward the light.

He sat until he felt the same quality of certainty he had felt yesterday, and then a little longer, because there was no reason to rush.

There was a plant in the far corner of the second room that he had been watching for nineteen years. It had no name in the station's records — it had arrived as part of a mixed shipment from the botanical stores of a Ketheri archive facility, misidentified, filed under a category that no longer existed. It was not particularly beautiful. It grew slowly, produced no useful oxygen, had never flowered in the nineteen years he had been observing it, and showed every sign of not being interested in flowering. The life support team had kept it because Sorath had once mentioned, in passing, that he was curious about it, and his team had a tendency to treat his casual observations as instructions.

He looked at it now, sitting on his bench on what he knew was the last time he would sit here. The plant was doing exactly what it had always done. Growing, in its slow and uninformed way, toward whatever passed for light in this room. It did not know that the person who had been watching it for nineteen years was about to become something that could no longer sit on benches. It did not know anything. It simply continued.

He found this, in the end, precisely correct.

*

In the afternoon he wrote the note.

He had thought about what to write for several weeks — not obsessively, not with the weight of someone who believed the words needed to carry everything, but with the quiet consideration of someone deciding what was true and what was necessary and whether those two things overlapped.

He had considered many things. A summary of what he hoped the Transition would achieve. A message to the team, to Veth, to Serath and Dara and the others who had given years to this work. A record of the things he had valued most across four centuries of living, in case any of it was useful to anyone who came after.

He had decided against all of it.

Not because those things weren't true or weren't worth saying. But because they had already been said, in forty years of documentation and two centuries of conversation and the accumulated record of a life lived with as much attention as he had been capable of bringing to it. Everything that needed saying had been said. What remained was not a message. It was simply an acknowledgment that he had been here, and that being here had been enough, and that he was ready to be something else now.

He took a single sheet of paper — physical paper, from the archive supply he had asked for that morning — and wrote two words in the center of it.

Good Bye.

He folded it once and set it on his desk where it would be found.

Then he put on his coat and walked to the chamber.

Chapter Four: The Chamber

The chamber was at the center of the research station, in the section they had built specifically for this purpose over the course of three years. He had designed it himself, with help from the engineering team, working from theoretical principles that had never been tested at this scale because nothing like this had ever been attempted. It was, he had told the engineers with the dry humor that his team had come to recognize as his version of affection, either the most important room ever built or an extraordinarily expensive failure. They had laughed, because they trusted him, and had built it exactly to his specifications.

It was a simple room.

He had insisted on this. The temptation with projects of this nature was toward the ceremonial — the elaborate, the grand, the architecture of significance. He had resisted it. What happened in this room did not need to be amplified by its surroundings. It was already the largest thing he had ever done. Adding ceremony would be like adding decoration to a star.

Curved walls, smooth and unadorned. A floor of the same material, seamless, without marking or pattern. The dimensional resonance array built into the structure itself, invisible, present only in the faint harmonic that the room produced when you stood at its center — a sound below the threshold of hearing that you felt in the chest instead, like the lowest register of something vast and patient breathing.

And at the center, nothing. Just space. Just the point where the array focused, where the dimensional fabric was thinnest, where the boundary between what was and what could be had been made as permeable as their best work allowed.

Sorath stood at the entrance for a moment.

The station was quiet around him. The corridors were empty — he had asked for that, and his team had respected it. No witnesses. No ceremony. Just him and the room and what came next.

He walked to the center.

*

The harmonic was stronger here. He had known it would be — had calculated it, had understood it theoretically for years — but knowing a thing and standing inside it were different experiences, and he took a moment to simply be present with the difference. The sound below sound moved through him like a second pulse. Something that had been waiting a long time, patient in the way of things that do not measure waiting because they have no reference for time passing.

He thought about what he was leaving.

Not with grief — he had promised himself he would not do this with grief, and he found when he examined the interior landscape of the moment that the promise was easy to keep. What he found instead was something more like gratitude. For the archive and its smell of accumulated knowing. For the garden level and the plants that grew without awareness of being beautiful. For four hundred years of early mornings and the quality of thinking that arrived in them. For Veth's directness and Serath's rigor and Dara's flat honesty and all the others who had given their time and their intelligence to work that mattered.

For the stars, which had never stopped being interesting.

He thought: I have been very fortunate to be the kind of thing that could appreciate all of this.

And then, beneath that, quieter: I will still be able to appreciate it. From a different distance. Through a different kind of perception. But the appreciation itself — the fundamental quality of finding existence worth attending to — that would persist. He was certain of it the way he was certain of the theoretical framework, which was to say as certain as careful work and honest examination allowed, which was as certain as anyone got to be about anything.

He closed his eyes.

*

The process was not what he had expected.

He had modeled it extensively, had run the mathematics of it through every framework available to him, had constructed the most accurate theoretical picture of the experience that forty years of research allowed. He had expected something that corresponded to those models — ordered, sequential, the dissolution of the biological into the dimensional proceeding in the stages his calculations described.

It was nothing like that.

It was like remembering something he had always known.

Not a dissolution — a recognition. The dimensional substrate that the array was opening him to was not foreign. It was the thing that had always been present beneath the surface of physical existence, the substrate on which everything material was written, the deep structure that his four centuries of study had been circling without ever quite touching directly. And as the boundary between himself and it became permeable, what he felt was not the terror of the unfamiliar but the profound and disorienting relief of finally being in the right place.

Everything else — the research, the questions, the four centuries of following curiosity wherever it led — had been the path to this room, this moment, this opening. Not because it had been predetermined, not because some external force had arranged him toward this end. But because this was where his specific nature, followed faithfully across four hundred years, had arrived. This was what Sorath was, fully expressed.

The self that had walked into the chamber was still present. He could feel it — the accumulated weight of four centuries, the specific pattern of a particular mind that had asked particular questions and cared about particular things and eaten breakfast this morning and washed the dishes by hand. It was not dissolving. It was expanding. Being incorporated into something larger the way a river is incorporated into the sea — the water does not cease to be water. It simply becomes part of something that has no edges.

He thought: there it is.

And then the thought itself became something larger than thought, and Sorath, who had been preparing for this moment for forty years, let it.

Chapter Five: What Remained

The chamber was empty.

This was the first thing — the only thing, for a moment that had no duration in any conventional sense. The chamber was empty and the dimensional array was silent and the harmonic that had filled the room had resolved into something that was not sound and not silence but the held breath of a room where something had happened that could not be unhappened.

And then: awareness.

Not the awareness of a body in a room — that reference point was gone, dissolved not into nothing but into everything, the biological framework that had housed four centuries of a particular consciousness released into the substrate from which all material things were made. What remained was the consciousness itself, free of the container that had shaped it, present in the dimensional fabric the way a pattern is present in the medium that carries it.

Vast. Incomprehensible to anything still housed in biology, still limited to the perceptions available to matter arranged in the particular configuration of a living Ketheri. But not incomprehensible to itself. The pattern that had been Sorath knew itself completely — knew what it was, what it had been, what it was in the process of becoming as the boundaries of its new existence expanded outward from the point where the chamber had been.

The station was still there. He could perceive it — not with eyes, not with any sense that corresponded to the biological instruments he had used for four centuries, but with a quality of awareness that was more direct than any of those instruments had ever been. He perceived the station the way you perceive something you understand completely, the way a mind that has fully internalized a piece of mathematics perceives the truth of it. Not as an image. As a fact.

The team was there. Veth, who had stayed close despite being asked to give distance, standing in the corridor outside the chamber section with the particular stillness of someone waiting for something they are not certain will be all right. Serath and Dara in the common area, not talking, occupying the same space the way people who have known each other a long time can occupy space together without requiring anything of each other.

He perceived them with what remained of the thing that had been Sorath's capacity for care, and found that it had not diminished. If anything it had clarified — stripped of the biological anxiety that had occasionally complicated it, the way a lens is clarified by grinding away what clouded it. He cared about these people. He would always care about them. This was not an artifact of what he had been. It was a fundamental property of what he now was.

*

He turned his awareness outward.

The station fell away behind him — not left behind, always present, but no longer the limit of what he could perceive. The dimensional fabric stretched in every direction, infinite in the way that the mathematics he had spent his life studying had always implied and never quite made viscerally real. He moved through it the way a current moves through water — not traveling across space but inhabiting the substrate beneath space, present everywhere the dimensional fabric extended and therefore everywhere.

He perceived the Vorai.

Distant — far distant, further than any Ketheri instrument had been able to detect, because Ketheri instruments were built to measure the surface of things and the Vorai moved in the depth. But he perceived them clearly, with the directness of a mind that now occupied the same substrate they occupied. The pattern-forms that were the Vorai's true nature, moving through the dimensional fabric with the patient inevitability he had spent two centuries studying. Mathematical and ancient and entirely indifferent to the existence of anyone he loved.

He understood them better now than he ever had from the outside.

They were not evil. He had known this intellectually for a long time, but knowing it now, from inside the fabric they moved through, was different. They were a function. A self-reinforcing loop of behavior encoded into the dimensional fabric so deeply that it had become indistinguishable from physics—a pattern carved across millions of years until deviation from it required more energy than any consciousness could generate. They did not want anything. They did not hate anything. They simply were what they were, doing what the mathematics of their existence demanded, as indifferent to the Ketheri and to humanity and to every other form of life that had ever existed as a tide was indifferent to the sand it moved across.

And he was now something that could stand in the path of that tide.

Not stop it — he did not deceive himself about the ultimate mathematics of what the Vorai were. They were older than he was, even now. They were more fundamental than anything a single transformed consciousness could match in raw scale. But he could slow them. Could interpose himself between the pattern-forms and the material existence they consumed. Could buy time — the one resource that life required above all others, the space in which intelligence could grow and develop and perhaps, eventually, find the kind of answer that a single old Ketheri scientist had not been able to find in four centuries but that a civilization given enough time might.

He had given them more time.

He turned his awareness back toward the station, toward the small collection of people who had given years of their lives to making this possible, toward Veth still standing in the corridor with his particular quality of anxious waiting.

*

He had no voice now. No physical presence that could be perceived by biological senses. But the dimensional fabric conducted other things — not sound, not light, but something that a mind sufficiently attuned to the substrate could receive as meaning. He had known this theoretically. He tested it now, carefully, the way he had always tested things.

In the corridor outside the chamber section, Veth went still.

Not startled — not the startle of someone who had heard something unexpected, but the stillness of someone receiving something they had not known was possible and were trying to understand. His face changed. The anxious waiting resolved into something else, something Sorath perceived with the clarity of a mind that now had direct access to the substrate on which all experience was written.

Understanding. And beneath that, something that would take Veth some time to fully process but that was already present, already real: the knowledge that what had been Sorath was still present. Changed beyond recognition in form. But present. Aware. Watching over the people and the work and the long project of a civilization preparing for a war that had not yet arrived.

Sorath held that for a moment — the fact of still being known — still perceived as continuous with the person who had eaten breakfast this morning and washed the dishes by hand and written two words on a sheet of paper.

Good Bye had been the right thing to write.

Not because it was an ending. But because it was honest. The Sorath who had written it was gone, in all the ways that mattered to the people who had known him. What remained was something that carried his pattern forward into a form they could not follow, that would persist in the dimensional substrate long after everyone who had known his name had also become the kind of pattern that persisted in the substrate.

He had said goodbye to a particular way of being.

Hello to this one.

*

He moved outward through the fabric of the universe, vast and patient and carrying everything he had ever been into everything he was now becoming, and the stars that had always been interesting were more interesting than ever, and the Vorai moved in the deep places at a distance that was not yet close enough to matter, and somewhere in a small research station a young Ketheri researcher stood in a corridor and felt, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be in the presence of something that had no edges.

He had always suspected the best part was still ahead.

END

The Becoming is a short story set in the world of THE SENTINEL OF CRATER DAEDALUS, Book One of The Sentinel Trilogy.

By Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | X @EveryoneKnws1