erns of basic force. I searched my own being, analyzed myself. I was
not gas. I was not solid. I was not even force. Yet I existed. I could
reason. I was a beginning, a sudden beginning. And I had duration
because I knew that time had elapsed since the moment I _awakened_
though I had no means of telling how much time or of even naming the
period.

* * * * *

Could I really be _pure reason_? Can reason exist? Can rational entity
exist without a groundwork of matter, or at least of force?

It could. It must. I was rational entity and I existed. Yet I could find
nothing of force, nothing to occupy space about my _self_. For all I
could ascertain, I might have covered a one-dimensional point in
eternity or I might have been spread throughout vast distances.

From this reasoning I concluded that rational entity might occur either
as some force unlike that of all natural phenomena in space, or as some
combination of these forces at the moment beyond my own power to
analyze, even detect. I finished with that for the time being.

How did I come into being? I discarded the question as unanswerable
temporarily. What was I before that instant I suddenly reasoned _cogito,
ergo sum_? I could not say.

How did I know I even existed, really? Obviously because I was capable
of rational thought. But what was thinking? First it was perceiving and
accepting my own existence; beyond that, it was recognizing the dark
nothingness around me and the forces it contained. I had to exist.

But how did I know nothingness was right? And how did I know its
darkness was right? And how did I know the waves of force were _waves_
and _force_? And how did I know matter was _matter_ and that I was none
of these?

"Symbols," I reasoned. "I'm thinking in symbols. I could not reason
without symbols; therefore I could not exist as I am without symbols to
think with."

Yet whose symbols were they? Where and how did I come by them? I could
think back clearly to the instant of my creation, yet I had not invented
the symbols in the interim of my existence, nor had they been given to
me. What then? They were part of me when I came alive in this universe,
had been _invented_ some other time and elsewhere by someone else or by
what I was before I became the entity of reason I now was.

Then that first flash of perception in nothingness was not spontaneous.
There was something behind it. I was something before that moment, i