He repeated countless experiments, creating innumerable "lives" for nothing more than verifying data. At last, he carried out his final—and maddest—attempt on the fertilized egg created by himself and his wife. Like a crazed gambler, he staked every last chip on this final wager. He tried to strip away every impurity from the one who inherited his genes, allowing them to be born into the world as the finest Coordinator.
For that purpose, he even created a vast number of fertilized eggs, intending to keep only that single "perfect" one.
He left one—only one—of those many fertilized eggs inside his wife's body to be born through natural pregnancy. Perhaps that was the bare minimum of compensation for his wife, Via Hibiki, who had wept as she opposed the experiment. Or perhaps he wanted a spare "control group" in case the experiment failed. That arrogant man, who rejected the notion of humans being born as humans and tried to make life exist independently of the mother's body and even of human identity, might still have retained a flickering, candle-stub remnant of love for his wife deep within his heart.
The child left inside the mother's body was Cagalli Yula Athha, who was later sent to Orb and became its princess. And the child selected to be placed in an artificial womb, carrying all the fruits of ambition and technology...
But... could that truly become happiness?
The finest Coordinator? A human with superhuman intelligence, physical abilities, and reaction speed, flawless in every measurable category? Then, would possessing such so-called perfection automatically bring happiness? Was happiness a program that could be written into a genetic sequence?
Could that child, born from a cold machine devoid of a heartbeat, a child who had never felt the warmth of a mother's body in amniotic fluid,