A Covariant Objective Present: Relativistic becoming read as actualization, without a global "now"

Version v2 (July 2026). The defence of the tempo ν (dN/dτ as a physical rate of becoming) is now anchored on its established covariant pedigree: Arthur (1982) and Dieks (1988) on proper time as the rate of becoming along a worldline, with Skow's distinction (physical vs metaphysical rate) answering Smart's regress. Minor status correction: the thermodynamic value is 'argued', not 'acquired'. Presentism and the growing block universe make the present an objective frontier, but presuppose a global "now" that the relativity of simultaneity forbids — the Rietdijk–Putnam argument, which pushes the metaphysics of time toward eternalism (past, present and future equally real). We defend a metaphysical thesis, empirically equivalent to quantum mechanics and relativity and so judged by its coherence and unifying power, not by a prediction. In the Time–Actualization (TA) ontology, the present is not a slice of simultaneity but the act of actualization of quantum potentialities into events; becoming is covariant — the order of birth of events is pure gauge, only the causal order and the event count being real. Read this way, TA instantiates a growing block universe without a global present, so the relativistic objection loses its purchase (it targets a global "now" that TA does not have). This dissolution is, originally, Stein's point-relative becoming; TA inherits it and lodges a process within it, uniting Stein's becoming and the covariant growth of Rideout–Sorkin causal sets under a single realist reading: becoming is actualization, ontologically the measurement event (whose basis and trigger TA anchors, the outcome remaining given by Born). The contribution is an ontological synthesis, not a new formalism or a new prediction. The label-invariance objection to causal-set becoming (Wüthrich–Callender) and the relativistic objection to the growing block (Earman) are met via a distributive reading of becoming.