In 1945, the skies above Tokyo had gone black with ash, and the streets reddened with grief. Cities cracked like porcelain. The silence that followed the war wasn't peace, it was vacancy. A void. Something that echoed louder than gunfire. And it was in this void that Dr. Yuichi Kuroda began his work. He was 32 years old. A prodigy. A wartime surgeon. A man forged in the theater of human collapse. He had seen the inside of too many skulls. Not metaphorically—literally. The soft folds of the brain opened like a flower under the scalpel. He watched men forget their names, their mothers, their language—shrapnel to the left lobe. Identity erased. Gone.
"So fragile," he wrote once. "And yet so programmable."
Dr. Yuichi Kuroda started an experiment. An experiment that lasted for 17 years. A truly groundbreaking one. He was no longer the wartime surgeon he once was, he was now a scientist. At just 32 years old, he found out the secret to cloning the perfect human.
"Children are born as blank slates, waiting to be shaped by those who control. Humans can become anything." He had said.
But what was perfect? What does perfection look like? Can perfection be born? Or is perfection created? What exactly does 'blank state' mean? And why did he see that as perfection? He shaped those children into anything he wanted. Humans can be anything, right? Therefore, he kept them as blank states. Emotionless. Why?
"The perfect human isn't in the eye of the beholder but in my eyes." He had said. "I will make the perfect humans. Emotionless soldiers, I wanted to prove that humans are blank states waiting to be shaped. And I, I am the one who shapes."
Dr Yuichi Kuroda's clones were fed. They were bathed. But they were never touched. They were kept in rooms where the walls were sterile, the air was thin, and time had no meaning. Everything had its place. Every action was calculated. Each moment was carefully planned. They were never asked to cry. They were never allowed to feel.
"Emotion is a weakness," Yuichi would whisper to himself late at night. "The perfect human is not emotional. The perfect human is a machine."
Their names? They had no names, no history, no individuality. Names, to Yuichi, were a form of identity. But identity was a weakness. In his vision, they were not meant to be people; they were not meant to have desires or dreams. They were soldiers.
"What is a soldier," Yuichi asked once, "but a perfect machine? A machine built to follow?"
Dr. Yuichi Kuroda had always prided himself on the stillness of his work. The hum of the machines, the rustle of the sterile documents, the barely audible breath of the clones, all of it was deliberate. The world outside, with its mess of emotions, its chaotic wars, and its fragile notions of life, had no place in here. In the cold, ordered space of the laboratory, Yuichi Kuroda had designed perfection. He had built it with his own hands, one blank state at a time. But there had been no time for closure. No final experiment. No triumphant conclusion. Yuichi had never believed in endings. That was for people who were weak. His vision had been too grand for mortality. Too vast for the constraints of a single life. He had never seen death as a natural conclusion but a temporary inconvenience. It was something to be pushed through, to be conquered, like the bodies he had shaped; he would rise again. And so, before the final unraveling of his mind, Yuichi left behind two things for Kazou: DNA and rough drafts. He then vanished silently, without a trace. His lab was empty, no children, empty. Everyone vanished in 1962.
His final DNA and drafts that were left for Kazou?: The groundwork for a Polish soldier and a mother.
What else could Kazou do? He had been raised in the shadow of his father's ambition. All his life, he had been told he was destined to finish what had been started. There were no other paths. No other choices. The world outside the laboratory had its flaws. It's darkness. Was this really any different? He had to wonder. But he also knew: this wasn't just about completing a project. It was about unfinished business—his father's obsession with something beyond perfection. Kazou could feel his father's unspoken command, a pressure to create the last pieces of this twisted puzzle. The DNA samples sat before him now, preserved in sterile vials. Kazou believed that what his father did was for the good. He was never told that it was wrong. Yuichi Kuroda was a master manipulator, manipulating his wife into believing it was all for the good, then passing it on to Kazou.