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 upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.
This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing 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.
-Exultant, Ch. 35