Starlight

Grace is a clone. At least, that's how she was originally conceived. She looks exactly like the cloned girls. She has immunity, an origin that's never explained. And there's a photo of her in the game files with the caption "Grace, 7 years old."

So, they originally wanted to make Grace a clone, but scrapped the idea in the later stages of development. As a result, the logic and coherence of the story suffered.

Changing Grace's role pulled a whole domino effect of issues along with it. In that case, what’s the point of this whole storyline with the cloned girls if it has nothing to do with Grace? Just to confuse the player? Why are we shown clone experiments at ARK if a successful memory transfer was never actually achieved?

To answer these questions, we need to take a closer look at that orphanage scene. Gameplay-wise, it’s agonizingly boring, but it’s actually crucial to the plot and provides a lot of valuable information about Grace’s origins.

We see a girl named Chloe who was infected with the T-virus but, unlike the other children, didn’t go insane. According to the scientist, she displayed symptoms of infection, but otherwise proved much more stable than clones from another series. A note also mentions that the "Chloe" series shows signs of stability.

This means the scientists at ARK achieved a positive result and continued working on the “Chloe” series, breeding increasingly stable subjects with each iteration. Meanwhile, all the rabid clones that went on a rampage that night were disposed of.

So, we’ve established that ARK had several clone lines used to selectively breed the ideal vessel for memory transfer.

It follows that all subsequent clones trace their origin back to Chloe, including Grace.

To illustrate this clearly, I drew up this diagram:

The cloning project was started in the 1980's under Umbrella. Its intention was to create the perfect genetic host for Oswell Spencer to transfer his consciousness and memories into an attempt to achieve immortality. This is the project that Chloe was made from.

It is not the same project that The Connections did under Victor Gideon from 2004 to 2026. They purchased up some of Umbrella's assets and research after they went defunct, and Victor continued the project. This is the project that Emily and Marie were made from.

Grace is the "original" of the post-2004 The Connections clone project. Victor didn't have direct access to Grace, only incomplete genetic data provided by the organization. Meaning the girls he created aren't even clones in the traditional sense, but genetically modified counterfeits brought as close to the original as possible. This explains his words that “there is no connection between Grace and Emily.” Because they are clones from different series with slight variations in their genome, reacting differently to T-virus infection: Grace shows no symptoms at all, whereas in Emily, it caused cataracts.

There’s such a wide gap of years in Grace’s creation date because we don't know exactly when Alyssa interviewed Spencer. Even Koshi himself doesn't know how old Grace is; according to him, she’s roughly 25 or 26. So there’s no exact birth date in the lore yet. The year 2004 was taken as a starting point because that was the year Victor first obtained data on Grace.

I’d also like to separately address the scene where Zeno shows Grace the photos of the cloned girls. For most people, this moment caused total confusion. And that’s no surprise, because the information here is presented in an extremely messy and disjointed way.

In the photos, we see dates in reverse order: 2020, 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, 2005. Meaning these are the clones Victor made after 2004 when he took charge of the medical center. Zeno says these are copies, attempts to recreate Grace, and that’s actually true.

But then, without any transition, Zeno cuts to video footage of the events at the orphanage in the 90s and continues talking about it in the context of experiments to recreate Grace—claiming that they (the scientists in the 90s, right) failed to recreate Spencer’s key.

“But now we have the Original. We have you. You can unlock Elpis at ARK.”

It feels like an entire paragraph of text was missed here, where Zeno was supposed to explain the 90s ARK experiments and how Grace resulted from them, followed by his and Gideon’s failed attempts to recreate Spencer’s key. After which Grace would ask: “So, what?.. I was made?”

Admit it, the dialogue sounds infinitely more reasonable that way. The original scene is broken on multiple levels.

First of all, Zeno is made to look like a complete idiot who can’t do basic math and thinks Grace was the original for the 90s clones. Sure, Zeno is an idiot for injecting himself with Elpis without a second thought. Fair enough. But Grace isn't stupid, is she? She works as an FBI analyst; she should have caught that inconsistency immediately.

Secondly, in the 90s, they were trying to create Spencer’s key, not recreate it, as Zeno claims. That was when the first memory transfer experiments were being conducted; no "Spencer’s key" even existed yet. Grace appeared no later than 2004.

And thirdly, there’s a complete lack of logic here. If scientists in the 90s tried to create Spencer’s key and failed, where did Grace come from? Or did she appear before 1990? Did memory transfer technology exist back then? And what were the scientists at ARK doing in that case? Doesn't this all strike you as total nonsense?