The Many Arms of Doctor Verrick
The fourth arm arrived without any capricious fanfare. There was no process announcement, no abnormal vitals, no neural dissonance. Verrick had expected fever, spasms, some loss of equilibrium. But V9 absorbed the change like a man slipping into a warmer coat. On the fourth morning, the tunic's side seam bulged. On the fifth, it split right open. The new limb stretched outward tenuously slow, like a cat waking from sleep, sprawling on its back. V9 didn't speak of it at all, keeping a copiously demure composure. He acknowledged its presence, but only in the way a person accepts the presence of gravity. He moved fluidly around the room, performed manual tests without any prompting. The fourth arm had full range of motion within two days and blended in naturally with the motion of the others.
Verrick entered descriptive notes, but they felt somewhat inadequate. Something deeper was happening, beneath the tissue hidden beneath the patterns of ambient thought and synchronous motion.The clone now requested access to books. No fiction. Nothing social. Technical manuals, historical biology texts, medical surgery methods. V9 read voraciously, not skimming them but a more vacuum forced digestion. In four hours, he finished a 300-page text on prosthetic integration theory and asked for a blank notebook. Camile said nothing, but Verrick saw her hesitation. "You don't have to be afraid of him," he told her. She met his eyes. "I'm not afraid. I'm wondering if I should be." The camera feed showed V9 sitting in the far corner, flipping through The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Bogota folded her arms. “I’m invoking the Clause.” Verrick turned sharply. “Bogota —” “Clause Seven,” she said. “Autonomous phenotypic divergence combined with unsupervised intellectual activity. He’s possibly becoming unpredictable.” “He’s becoming self-aware.” “That’s not our mandate,” she said. Verrick, “Then Bogota, our mandate is flawed.” She relented her position.
Security protocols had always been redundant on orbital lab Lysithea. No one expected clones to navigate digital architecture. No one expected them to *ask* for it. V9 didn't break the firewall. He requested access to a private node in the central archive. "I want to compare versions," he said. "Versions of what?" Verrick asked. "Me." Verrick considered denying him access altogether. Instead, he created a limited-access sub-channel, read-only, to the V1 through V8's developmental records. V9 read all the relevant research data in two hours.
Afterward, he went silent for three complete days, No drawing or writing. Just quiet movement in the observation room, stretching all four arms as though meditating in a quasi Zen state. Then he asked for a mirror. They installed one made of polished steel, one meter tall, mounted just outside the hygiene station in the corner. V9 stood before it for forty minutes without speaking, just staring.
Verrick watched from behind the glass. Each arm moved in perfect succession: shoulder roll, wrist flex, finger spread. Then again. Then again. Like a sequence, a code. Camile stepped into the viewing room and said nothing for a while. Finally: "Do you think he's posing? "No," Verrick said. "I think he's becoming."
That night, Verrick had a dream. Not from his own mind, it came with the weight of someone else's cognitive stimuli. In the dream, he stood in a room of bodies. Not corpses but *copies*, all of himself. Some with two arms, some with three, some so evolved their torsos curved with alien symmetry. And all of them stared at him, the original. He awoke with his hands clenched. When he entered the lab that morning, V9 greeted him with a new phrase: "You dreamed about me last night." Verrick's pulse jumped. "I dreamed about the others," V9 continued. "The failed ones, I see them sometimes. Flickering behind my eyes." "That's impossible," Verrick said quietly. "I know." The clone smiled. "And yet here we are.
The first time the arm moved on its own, Verrick thought it was a malfunction in the video playback. The lab feed had a half-second delay, enough to miss something subtle. But when he reviewed the footage again, frame by frame, it was unmistakable. The fourth arm, resting flat on the stainless steel table, had lifted slightly. Not in concert with the others. Independently. Purposefully. Like it was testing the air around it and V9 hadn't noticed. He was sketching with the upper right hand, calibrating a balance interface with the upper left, and using the third arm to stabilize the table leg. But the fourth, newest and lowest, reached almost idly into the air. As if it had a mind of its own!
Verrick considered administering sedation, the protocols allowed for it. Cognitive drift, physiological anomalies, unscheduled behavior, all fell under the purview of emergency containment. But he didn't authorize it, Instead he observed the situation further. That afternoon, he asked V9 a direct question: "Are you still you? "V9 cocked his head slightly. "Who else would I be?" "I don't know. That's what I'm asking." The clone held his gaze for a moment too long. "I'm a continuation," V9 said. "An unfolding. If you look for me in the seed, you won't find me. But I was there." It wasn't a threat, but it certainly felt like one.
Camile had begun keeping her distance. She no longer asked questions about the clone's progress. Her console notes were brief, technical, sterile. Verrick watched her leave the lab early two days in a row, eyes shadowed. "Do you believe in "Infections contagion?" "No," she said. "Ideas?" He didn't answer.
She asked him that evening over tea in the confines of the rec pod. The fifth arm started as a whisper of electrical noise. Unexplained static in V9's peripheral EMG readings. At first, Verrick thought it was background noise, solar interference from the southern panel grid. Then he noticed the pulses clustered near the thoracic bridge. An arm wanted to grow before there was even tissue. The body was listening to the mind. He ran three full-body scans. The fifth arm hadn't manifested physically yet but it was forming *electrically*. The blueprints were broadcasting ahead of the biology. Verrick felt cold.
That night, he dreamed of spiders, not the monstrous kind. The quiet kind, precise and architectural. They moved through a glass-walled city of copies, laying strands between versions of himself. One Verrick wept behind a red curtain. One had no face. One wrote formulas on the ceiling with eight hands. He awoke with the sensation of silk across his arms. There was nothing there. Except, perhaps, a memory that wasn't his.
Lysithea's space bound silence had always comforted Verrick in it's own way. The orbiting lab was designed for complete isolation. No background chatter, no earthbound newsfeeds, just the low hum of climate systems and the occasional ping from diagnostic pulses on the mainframe. But in the third month of V9's development, the silence turned oppressive, like a room holding its breath. The fifth arm began to form physically within 72 hours. This time, no swelling, no transitional phase. The limb appeared with structural integrity already established. The tendons flexed on their first test, and neural responsiveness registered at 91% within minutes. Camile refused to log the data. "You'll need to write this one yourself," she said, sliding her tablet across the table. Her hands shook. Verrick nodded, there were no more arguments.
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