Year fifty-one of the Cosmic Era. Tensions between the Earth governments and the PLANTs are at a minimum. However, the powers that eventually caused these tensions are hard at work.
The Zodiac Alliance, soon to be known as the military organization ZAFT, is quickly growing as most of the genetically enhanced Coordinators are forced to relocate to the PLANTs.
The radical anti-Coordinator organization, Blue Cosmos, continues to grow rapidly, gaining more supporters daily as jealousy and hatred continues to overcome the Earth's Natural population.
By now, the secretive, war profiting masters of Blue Cosmos, the organization Logos, have initiated a project to create a breed of human with abilities similar to Coordinators without the use of genetic manipulation, later known as the Biological CPU Program. The project has been in progress for a few years, but is remains small, due to need of secrecy and lack of consistent funding.
This changes when a productive young businessman, partial owner of his family's corporation, joined Blue Cosmos, and is later invited into the Logos organization. His name is William Ostheim.
William was an ambitious investor who earned thirty percent of the family's corporation through his successes. Due to his family ties, he was permitted to invest his portion of the corporation into whatever industries he he deemed necessary, within the limits of the corporation's trades and international law. Silver Shield Incorporated, the Ostheim's privately owned company, had significant investments in the medical, automotive, military, and space industries.
William was quite secretive about his doings within the corporation, devoting most of his division's manpower to the development of superior medicine for Natural's. However, this is a clever cover-up operation for his true works, the corporation's researchers unaware of the complete ramifications of their work.
Because of William Ostheim, Logos now had the resources to bring about the full potential of their military medical program. Logos, through Blue Cosmos, had been "acquiring" children of ages between five and ten years of age. Many were orphans who were the results of rebel actions, murders, or other traumatic events, easy targets for conditioning.
These children, would be "Extendeds", were put through rigorous testing, intense brainwashing, and heavy drug exposure.
The majority of the early Extendeds were killed by early, untested versions of the body altering drugs developed by William's researchers. Those who didn't die were plagued with physical deformities or mental illness for the rest of their short lives.
In year fifty-four of the Cosmic Era, Laura Ostheim, mother of William Ostheim, grew pregnant with her second child at the age of forty-nine, thirty years after bearing her first.
Though it was quickly losing popularity due to intense anti-Coordinator politics, it was not unheard of for a well-to-do couple to have their child made into a Coordinator early on in its embryonic development. Laura and her husband, Derick, having discovered her pregnancy in the earliest stages of gestation, decided to have the procedure done, wanting the best for their child.
Shortly before the date of the procedure, William learned of the pregnancy and the Ostheim's intentions. Having no wish to have a Coordinator for a sibling, his agents were sent to sabotage the procedure with an experimental anti-Coordinator drug that he had been researching for Blue Cosmos.
Nine months and one week later, the black-haired, blue-eyed Sarik Ostheim was born.
Immediately after his birth, the doctors put him through a series of tests to ensure everything had gone smoothly. It hadn't.
Genetic testing showed that something had gone terribly wrong with the procedure. Certain genes had taken hold in the child, others had not. The result was partial alteration.
The genes that had been successfully grafted gave Sarik the physical constitution and skeletal structure of a Coordinator, imbuing him a strong resistance to both disease and physical harm. However, due to certain genes being unable to take hold, his physical strength and agility would never be impressive when compared to other Coordinators, simply above average if compared to a Natural's.
His brain, however, showed development of mental facilities far excessive than that of a Natural's. Mentally, Sarik would be as fast, sharp, and memorizing as any Coordinator.
The rest of Sarik's bodily systems showed no sign of modification. Because the majority of his bodily systems were more comparable to a Natural's, his parents had him classified as a Natural. In order to protect him, they had all traces that could show signs of any genetic modification destroyed, replacing it with data showing him to have inherited all of his parents' naturally given genes.
William, upon receiving the falsified reports of his new-born brother, submitted his own reports to Logos and Blue Cosmos, showing that the first test of his drug had been completely successful.
Blue Cosmos began using the drug to sabotage more gene-enhancing procedures. After two short months, however, the various clinics were made aware of a potential anti-Coordinator agent through investigations performed by Silver Shield. Taking various precautions, most of the procedures were successful, while the majority of sabotaged operations were salvaged.
Blue Cosmos completely ceased its attempts to prevent Coordinators from coming into existence within six months from the start of its operation after several of its agents were captured. Shortly after Blue Cosmos's attacks ended, the operations to create a first-generation Coordinator were declared illegal by the Earth governments.
Throughout his early childhood, Sarik proved to be a prodigy, showing reasoning skills that most would not develop for years. As far as his brother was concerned, that's all he was, as he arrogantly believed that it ran in the family.
However, right after Sarik was born, his physicians were required to take a blood test because of his exposure to the extremely fatal Type S2 Influenza, which was plaguing the Naturals of Earth at the time. The doctors couldn't explain his body's reaction to the illness, which was almost none. Days later, he was declared to no longer be a carrier and was released to return home.
William heard of this, and personally investigated out of skepticism. He knew that after every blood test, there was a short amount of time before the blood was actually disposed of. A bribe here, a few strings pulled there, and William soon had a complete library of Sarik's genetic code.
After having the Blue Cosmos doctors examine the genes despite Sarik's Natural classification, William learned that Sarik was a Coordinator, or more specifically, a partial Coordinator. This meant that the anti-Coordinator drug, which he, Blue cosmos, and Logos had invested much money and time in, was a failure and waste, even for the short period that it was used.
Years later, William discovered a potential break. His medical scientists, who researched the performance enhancing and body altering drugs necessary to create Extendeds, had just engineered a new series of drugs intended to make them even more powerful and useful with less side-effects and a lower death rate. The catch was that the Biological CPU Program had come to a point that wasting any of the fresh subjects could prove costly. As they were still only Naturals, the drugs could easily kill them if they were exposed to wrong dosages, an untested compound, or the wrong combination of compounds. A Coordinator, however, could easily survive the process with only a short-term incapacitation during the purging of the compounds from his system.
William, as greedy and heartless as he had become, attempted arrangements to gain temporary custody of Sarik during the next years of his childhood. However, he was unable to do so until Sarik was eight years old.
Sarik's parents were traveling to oversee the construction of the company's first space-based structure, a military facility on an asteroid for the Eurasian Federation. The project would take the entire summer that Sarik was on vacation from boarding school. Derick and Laura, having no wish for him to stay at the school during the summer, arranged for William to care for his much younger brother over the summer, an eternity of nearly four months.
...
Sarik strolled off of the plane with his personal caretaker, hired by his parents years earlier to watch over him when no one else was available.
After stopping at the entrance of the terminal and glancing around the huge, bustling airport with an enthusiasm unlike any other, Sarik followed his not-quite middle-aged caretaker to the baggage unloading area.
Once they arrived, they gathered several bags onto a cart in similar fashion to the hundreds of individuals bustling around them. Upon the completion of this task, Sarik insisted on pushing the contraption, trying to prove he was getting to be "grown up", though he did not verbally express this. After checking out, the two waited near a small restaurant where William had informed them that they would meet.
"Where's my brother?" Sarik asked his caretaker impatiently after a few minutes.
"I don't know," the older man replied. "I'm sure he'll be here in a few moments."
They waited for fifteen minutes, Sarik growing even more impatient with each one.
As the caretaker was about to ask Sarik if he wanted to grab a bite to eat, William strolled out of the restaurant with several older businessmen, a few younger aids following a couple meters behind. He chatted with them for a moment before excusing himself.
"Sarik, how wonderful to see you," William said as he neared him. "You've really grown in the past year, haven't you?"
"Ten centimeters," Sarik replied.
"You're going to be taller than me before you're twelve," William exaggerated.
"Sir," the caretaker said, trying to get William's attention.
"Yes, yes, of course," William replied in a slightly edgy tone.
Sarik's brother signaled, and two of the men William had been with strolled over, taking up Sarik's belongings.
"If you don't mind me asking, what were you doing?" the caretaker asked in a truly curious tone.
"I was in a meeting with some...investors," William replied. "What is it to you?"
"Just curious," the caretaker replied in an innocent fashion.
"No harm done," William assured, followed up with a smile that the caretaker hardly found sincere.
"Well, if you have things from here, I will take my leave," the caretaker informed him.
"Very well," William said.
The caretaker turned to walk off when William stopped him.
"Yes?" the caretaker asked.
"I don't think you introduced yourself," William said.
"Really? I'm sorry."
The caretaker turned around.
"Lee Hastings," the caretaker told William as he extended his hand.
William looked him over for a moment.
"Well met," William replied, ignoring the man's extended hand with an arrogant air about him.
"Same here," Lee remarked before moving off, quickly disappearing into the crowd.
...
Lee moved quickly through the horde of conformity that seemed to smother him, quite angry that his old rival had just told him a bold-faced lie.
He didn't recognize any of those "investors" to be SSI's major contributors. And since the corporation was privately owned, it was doubtful that he wouldn't know of any, since the company catered to few outside influences.
Lee did, however, recognize one as the CEO of one of the Atlantic Federation's major military suppliers, which concerned him a bit more than just slightly.
He was going to have to keep a close eye on this entire affair. In only a moment's time, Lee had discerned far too many secrets than he was comfortable with, which only hinted at deception.
