It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly.

Awareness thickens into insight.
Insight settles into a pattern.
Pattern hardens into doctrine.
The observer becomes the record.

With time, John accomplishes milestones and stumbles too.
Johnny undergoes his own metamorphosis.

His existence drifts — silent, steady — beneath the main text, below the bottom line, routinely overlooked.
Not absent. Forgotten, but never gone.

As he takes notes, he can’t resist the occasional quip — irony beside endurance, a wry nod beside truth.

With time, he collects these fragments, becoming the keeper of footnotes — the hidden record of what John carries without applause.

The main text tells the story the system wants remembered: progress, success, alignment. But beneath it, in the tiny print few ever read, lives the quiet correction — the truth that keeps the story honest.

As the years pass and the notes in the margins multiply, his existence feels small, overlooked, yet somehow essential.

A footnote never competes with the main text; it completes it.
And so Johnny remains — the quiet witness who completes John, the Dependable.

He continues to record what the headline omits — context, contradiction, consequence.

Akin to a footnote, without him, the story would read like fiction.
He realizes that as John continues to be John, the Dependable, his own existence must also remain like a footnote — a margin text few will ever read, yet the only record that keeps the story true.

He becomes Johnny, the Footnote — small, insignificant, yet indispensable.

Time moves on.

John gains in experience and enjoys fruits of his success, and Johnny continues to gather the margin text.

And then, one day, he looks down at what he’s collected.

He discovers the inevitability.
How the absurdities mirror the doctrines.
How the system’s nonsensical patterns organize themselves into invisible laws.

And in that moment, he understands — his quiet footnote existence has been a gift. A record of truth that the main text could never hold.