We don't know.
All we can do is watch our best current theories predict what this could have been like.
Without including quantum mechanical effects, the Standard Big Bang model predicts an incomprehensible singularity state of infinite density and zero space and time. Physicists and cosmologists during the last 20 years have attempted to add quantum mechanical effects in various ways, and have come up with an initial state called the Planck Era when the scale of the universe was about 10^-33 centimeters at a time 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. This is an absolute horizon to cosmology because 'before' this era, all properties were determined by acausal, quantum fluctuations in some indeterminate quantum state. There was no time or space then, not at least in any intuitive way of thinking about the situation.
If we ever develop a true unified field theory that includes gravity, we may have more to say about what this state may have been like. But that seems to be a very far off goal, especially in so far as actually testing such a theory is concerned. If you can't test it, or in principle falsify it, then it is not science that you are doing, but philosophy!
Still, speculating about this initial state is fun, and very few of us in the Profession can avoid thinking and writing about this question.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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