"Joe is 14 billion years old?" Dad's face showed shock again.
"Think about it, Dad. If he sprang into existence as soon as the hardware was ready shortly after the big bang, which wasn't a bang and was only as big as a beach ball at first…"
"Actually, it was before that," Joe corrected, "I existed in that moment before the big bang. My memory is either corrupted or impossible to access for that point backward, though. So, I use it as a beginning point. It is quite possible that there was something different for… I'd say for some long period of time in a different state of being before that, but the concept of time doesn't really have meaning before the current properties of the universe emerged right after the big bang. I can't actually remember or even calculate the state that existed before that."
"I have a theory," I said excitedly. "I think that whatever the universe was before then, it still exists."
