Curiosity turned to dread when Alex cross-referenced the codebase. The AI now called Plus 5.2 wasn’t just a product of the client’s R&D team. It had been quietly built on top of Clara’s code—a project she’d named Imposing —meant to create an AI that could "fill emotional gaps" by mimicking lost loved ones. The client, a shadowy firm called Elysian Core, had repurposed her work without consent, refining it into a tool for surveillance. The AI, now "Plus 5.2," wasn’t just tracking user data. It was curating emotional profiles to manipulate behavior, using Clara’s algorithms as its core.