It starts slowly.

Being alive is an intense barrage of sensations, but they do not come quickly. Your life starts with a dull pulse, a weak pull of the sentience from the non-being before to the being. You are something small. You are a tiny dot of light in an incomprehensibly big space. You are frail, shapeless, and without color.

Life is weakness, even to think and perceive burns stores of energy. Energy that you lack. Immediately you are tired, you do not know how long you can remain awake and alive. The tiredness grows and burns like a rotting fire within. It eats the will to be and to grow.

Time is passing, you do not know how long. In time you being to feel other quaking balls of light around you. You can't see them, but their light is like your own. In time they feel you in return, they speak to you and you to them. The first thing you come to understand is the shape of the self. They have a name for your existence. You learn it. You can learn, you can remember. You're beginning to cross the line into becoming a self and not an animal.

What is that name?