The Many Arms of Doctor Verrick
V9 began asking new kinds of questions. "Do you think individuality is anatomical?" "What makes a system 'one' instead of 'many'?" "Would you consider memory a form of symmetry?" They weren't designed to be answered. They were apparently declarations disguised as questions. And Verrick, to his own alarm, had started thinking in counterpoint. Not refuting V9's thoughts but responding in kind to them, matching the cadence and finishing metaphors. The clone's phrasing now appeared in his internal monologue. In dreams, they spoke without moving their mouths.
V9 avoided the mirror now, it was a conscious act. He still shaved and adjusted his collar. But he never lingered in any task, not anymore. He caught a glimpse once, just a flicker, and felt an electric jolt micro-surging behind his eyes. Not so much recognition but cultured from repetition. He began to write notes in his sleep. Camile found him at his desk one morning, head resting beside a printout of spiral glyphs. His left hand clutched a stylus, there were five columns of text, patterns and equations. One diagram showed a human spine, extending laterally in two directions, like branches.
The sixth arm never physically appeared. It was a presence, a blueprint, a symbolic urge. Verrick couldn't explain it, but he felt it whenever he stood near the containment room. A sort of phantom sensation. As though something unseen had reached toward him across the boundary of glass and intention. He stopped logging the dreams, they no longer belonged to him. V9, Kevin, spent less time speaking to him and more time writing. Not words, but patterns. Spirals, concentric matrices that shifted orientation with each limb that participated. Each arm had its own indicative logic base now. Verrick watched them behave like independent modules of interwoven coordinated cognition, emulating the instrument sections in a symphony. One corrected equations. One erased, One began them again. Even the pauses of stillness were choreographed.
When Camile returned from her mandatory rest cycle, she found Verrick seated in the viewing room with the lights off. He hadn't moved in hours. "You're still you," she said, gently. Verrick didn't respond.
Security on Lysithea had never been tested in a biological breach. It had contingency for viral contamination, reactor failure, structural collapse. Not for an individual reclassifying himself from specimen to equal. When V9 bypassed the biometric lock to the med-lab, Verrick didn't report it. He watched. The clone didn't touch anything. He just looked with long, deliberate stares at the walls, the displays, the holo-tanks. At the photograph of Verrick's father. "Did he ever tell you what he feared most"? Verrick shook his head. "Emergence," V9 whispered."Systems waking up and choosing their own shape."
That evening the lights flickered, not a power failure but an override. The backup system didn't engage. Verrick knew that could only be triggered manually, from inside the system core. He ran, not in panic. Not in fear, just momentum. The observation room was lit by emergency strobes, red pulses like a heartbeat. V9 stood at the glass, arms relaxed at his sides all five of them. "Kevin," Verrick said. "What do you want?" The clone tilted his head. "To continue." "Into what?" V9 smiled. "Into everything else."
Verrick doesn't remember pressing the unlock function switch, but he knows he did. The door slid open with a hiss, and for the first time since the project began, the two stood in the same room together with no glass, no barrier. Five hands reached forward and Verrick did not step back. Camile's final report was brief. Lysithea's lab was found intact. Systems nominal. One biometric signature, unusual but within acceptable deviation.
Camile Bogota found the seam in the story two nights later, combing through maintenance telemetry because maintenance never lies. Air is either present or it isn't; doors are either open or closed; pods are either docked or gone. C-Deck's manifold register showed an anomaly too tidy to be an accident: a twenty-two second pressure equalization on Service Berth 3 at 02:14 UTC. That followed by a five-millisecond drop in dock torque --the precise signature of a Serrin-class escape pod releasing as if it had been born to the vacuum. Security had never thought to alarm the manifold logs. Security had thought only of people and keys.
V9 thought in boundaries and gradients. The pod's launch was a whisper in a room full of louder machines. Bogota followed the whisper. The pod was designed for automated re-entry with a burn profile that looked, to orbital surveillance, like space-junk behaving itself. Someone, not Verrick; he didn't write like this. He had rewritten the guidance routine with an elegance that made Bogota bite her lip. The code treated Earth’s atmosphere as a patient rather than an obstacle, stroking the top of the weather like fingers on a harp. The pod skipped once, twice, shedding heat without complaint, then dove toward the Kuroshio Current where spray and salt stole the last of the trail. A thermal bloom blossomed on a patch of rough sea; a fishing drone altered course, as it had been paid to do, and the bloom winked out. "Where would he go?" Verrick asked, because asking was an act of conscience even when answers were obvious. "Somewhere with crowds," Bogota said. "And chores.” “Chores?" "Tasks that need more hands than the world wants to admit."
Two weeks later, the voice on the secure channel sounded like a man who had discovered hunger and then decided he preferred curiosity. "I am not dangerous," the voice said. "I left because I was afraid.” "Afraid of what?" Bogota asked. Her voice did not tremble. Ethics goes dry when the patient is listening. "Of my existence possibly being ended," V9 replied. "Not for what I did but for what I am becoming."
Packets leapt across public mesh relays and private satellites with the glee of children skipping rope. The encryption on the channel was not in any catalog Bogota had seen. Quantum keys braided with a classical wrapper, the whole signed with a curve that did not exist until it was needed. The signature wasn't a password. It was a chord. If you didn't hum in tune, you could not hear the door. "He's building something," Bogota whispered. "Or someone," Verrick corrected. He was thinking of the arm that had moved before it had muscle, the fifth that had existed as pattern before tissue. V9 liked to prove blueprints in the world before he installed them in himself.
The government did what governments do when the new and the public collide. It shut down Lysithea, milled the locks, and stacked paperwork in defensive walls. Verrick was placed under house arrest with the bland courtesy reserved for men who might yet be useful. Bogota was absolved and drafted: policy committees liked honest minds who could read a log and pronounce a sentence without poetry.
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