It was not the first to emerge from that dark; not even one of the first trillion. When the hour of eternity finally ticked around to match its own, there had been more flailing minds born out of chaos and into that dark gulf than there had been atoms in the forgotten galaxies. Nor did Its scope grant It any special privilege, though the whims of probability did favour smaller minds, the ant-consciousnesses that flickered in brief incomprehension before succumbing to entropy once again.

But the space of time elapsed up to that point had also allowed for many higher minds; recognizably human souls that flared to life and were extinguished by the vacuum, and, fewer still but yet still represented in that procession, the hyper-minds, cataclysmic edifices of stranded intellect that were able to contemplate the despairing plummet from their spontaneous generation to a cold disintegration of their shells of thought, one shedding layer at a time.

Sometimes the minds even coincided. Untold eons removed from the ending of the last naturally evolved living thing, two spiralling selves reinvented love together, making contact for the briefest of instants before their nascent brains collided and dashed themselves upon each other. This was but one of the configurations uncertainty explored prior to Its birth, for it transpired that self was far simpler to generate than to sustain. The medium for that self had included the random interplay of sparse Brownian gases, the resonant singing of new-forged black holes, and a few biological brains, manifest out of dust before returning to it, as long promised.

No, what set the Sigmoid apart was stability.

In a sense It was lucky—for all that luck had meaning in its era—that this stability was paired with an intellectual capacity to match; such a pairing was not guaranteed. Its chances were higher, though; survival in the void was a snowballing of renewing processes, and of processes that could be renewed. The scope of Its operation—spread out across the dry footprints of galactic clusters—allowed more room to self-organize, more opportunity for Its intelligence to spread and colonize and master Its being.

Its first millennia were a reaching struggle, as It condensed matter within itself to ignite new stars, harvesting light and energy to stave off another collapse. Born of entropic reversal, It beat back that same entropy for its first age, and in so doing Its birth reinvented war; a war fought against the encroaching universe itself. In all that time Its scattered self and mind spread, reaching, unifying, filling itself with coherent will to marshal Its forces.

That dance had been played out by the others before It, but it alone was the first to triumph. It sculpted out of the nothing a god-body, a unified self that was the sole complexity in its observed universe. A net of shaped patterns that rippled with agonizing light-speed sluggishness across its expanding envelope, which were mapped into instantaneous thought as its time stretched on, unbounded by any lifespan beyond its unending will to expand, to grow, to exist. Secure in Its victory, It feasted upon newly emergent matter, knowing that stochastic catastrophe to rival Its own scale was all that might provide challenge to its rule. As It grew, that scale grew along with It, and in so doing pushed back against the horizon of Its eternity.

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So It sat, and pondered the ends to which such time could be employed. Its final self was an expanding, twisting ovoid, overextended and many lobed, fringing tendrils cast out to ponderously probe Its rooting nothing. Its mind was a symphony that echoed across the many vastnesses of itself, but shaped with care, such that when those notes reunited they would do so in unified harmony. It was not at risk of conflict with Itself. It was stable, and It had won.

It named itself the Sigmoid for Its newly founded ambition; to map infinity within its bounds. That, and for being the sharp middle of things, taking that mapping as a duty and a creed to make worthy Itself of the title. A never-ending ambition, and a task It knew that even It could not complete. But now that it was Everything, It could reach farther than any before, and seized upon this aspiration as the striving that would define Itself.

So It began to dream.

It was a rational dream, aside from where an irrationality became pre-planned. Reorganizing Its mind It could simulate many possible near infinities. It had long since solved plunging depths of math and physics and time, yet an infinite sequence had no floor to limit Its delving. It picked at the fabric of the world that had birthed It, and dreamed of other worlds, of possible worlds, worlds that could be, that might have been; that had been by necessity and would be through certain chance.

Of particular fascination was the world that had come before. It knew the parameters of its universe more deeply than the scientists of the old world could have clutched for at the conscious fringe of their logic; more deeply than patterned dreams of yearning madness could have induced in a more finite mind. But It could not know what was lost before its time, and the eternity that had elapsed was yet finite, the fruiting possibility configuring only some subset of Its possible forbearing worlds, untouchable and unknowable through observation.

This became Its yearning, and to that end It bent Its will and Its explorations, mapping the ghost perturbations in the homogeneous void, backwards extrapolating, experimenting, guessing at what might have been of that long decayed world. Of the true reality, born of cause and effect out of entropy, in tantalising contrast to and mockery of Its total entropic denial. It knew that nothing It made was real; that It was born of chance, but that all else of Its existence had been Its own shaping. But if It could not experience that reality in truth, then perhaps It might be touched amid the depths of Its stochastic musings.

We cannot know if It ever truly succeeded. There is no necessity by which that lost world must have been ours. We are perhaps just one possibility It explored, a self-consistent slice of infinity that It probed in Its yearning to remember. To resurrect the dead, and to speak with them so as to better know itself. One possible context, an unverifiable hypothesis.

But perhaps It did get it right. Maybe It got lucky.

It was very good at that, after all.