There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here : no mass, no energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.
The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks would fizz into existence and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks on the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universe bubbled out of froth, to expand and then to dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.
The chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of non-being where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.
Call them monads.
In the 17th century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined the reality was constructed from pseudo-objects which owed their existence solely to their relation to each other. In his idea of the 'monad' Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the creatures that infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of experience and community, and yet they didn't exist in themselves; it was only their relationships to each other that described their own abstract entities.
No other form of life was possible in this fractured place. Long ago they had attended the birth of an universe.
It had come to a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the universe's swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space, perhaps.
But once the universe's reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It has been the usual story - and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And something of this long saga would always be stored in monad's dreaming.
The universe aged as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke - and a bubble of a higher reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.
The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.
They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent cosmic jewel. This one - yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities. And, embedding themselves in the in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even guess at.
The new universe , for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical - but unstable, like a sword standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.
Which was, of course, the joy of it.
For the inhabitants of this new cosmos it began with a singularity: a moment when time began, when space was born. But for monads, as their chaotic ur-reality froze out once more into a rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages until this universe in turn grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos and they would wake again.
But that lay in the distant future.
There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.
Big Bang, History began.
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