Orifice

In the year 3000 as people evolved into stronger and more efficient multitaskers, they grew increasingly annoyed with the limits of the oral orifice, or mouth to use the vernacular. The people elected to create a new hole in their heads for breathing. The conventional mouth would be reserved for speech and assorted gestures of physical affection.

Oddly, the vote to add the new mouth was nearly unanimous, but the discourse concerning its location was robust and unrelenting. It was eventually decided that the mastication orifice would be located at the naval as the stomach would then be adjacent to it. This would require that all restaurants redesign their tables and that a new system of dining etiquette be implemented. All this could be easily done, of course. After all, humanity had made sudden changes before (like the last time it called itself humanity) and had even become somewhat accustomed to them.

Suggestions to locate the new mouth on hands were courageously defended, but were in the end such arguments found themselves deceased and desisted.

After two decades, humanity decided to go back to its old arrangement. People found that they missed the sensation of food travelling aaaaaaalll the way down the esophagus down into the deep pits of their bellies. People then decided that longer necks were in order. Arrangements for modification of the species were made shortly after.

Omnidexterity

As a child they called him a mutant. In school they called him a monkey boy. In college they called him a prodigy. I know him as Lile.

Lile can use all four of his limbs to perform four different tasks simultaneously. I don’t know how he does it, but it never ceases to amaze me. I have seen Lile write a paper, while painting a picture, while playing a boardgame, while singing, while standing. If he had had more limbs, I am quite convinced that he would have been able to use them for even more tasks at the same time.

I remember watching the BBC this one time. The show was about sea creatures. I remember seeing how different creatures were wired to interact with their environments through different sense receptors and with different appendages. I remember thinking to myself, Lile is like an octopus. I think I must have told him as much. In any case, he surely has thought something similar. I know because he has recently made a minor alteration to his body. Lile had some extra arms attached.

As it turns out, he isn’t able to use his new limbs. He says it’s probably just because people get wired to use different limbs when they are kids and now he’s too old. I’m not sure. Part of me thinks that people just can’t learn how to use more limbs than they aught to have. I mean if anybody should be able to learn how to use an extra arm or two, it’s Lile.

He did it. It took a year or so, but he did it. Lile is now the proud operator of six arms. He officially the worlds first functional human octopus. His parents who were once mildly ashamed of their freakishly talented little tyke are now very proud. I wonder what Lile will do with all those limbs.