In the very first moments after the Big Bang – when the universe was not yet even as old as the Planck time, the characteristic time of quantum uncertainty, less than one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second – the cosmos was a simple place, as well as a very small one. Even the forces of physics did not yet exist. Or rather, the four forces – gravity, electromagnetic, and the two nuclear forces – had not yet separated out of a primordial superforce. Jophiel remembered that Highsmith Marsden had hypothesised that this was the moment in which the seeds of the creatures that would become the Xeelee had been born, in the twisted spacetime that had prevailed in that brief epoch.
-Xeelee: Redemption, Ch. 21