Here’s some awesomeness from the world of robotics: a robot arm with six fingers that can detach itself and crawl on its own.

The contraption is the invention of a team from the School of Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who presented their work at a ROLE published earlier this month in Communication in Nature. Researchers have recently released a video of it in action, and it really brings home the fact that this thing belongs in a horror movie, not the pages of a science journal.

Too bad the hand has six – not five! – prehensile fingers. The paper explains that this particular design choice was made to improve the all-human limits of our piddling single thumb: “Human-like asymmetry and reliance on a thumb limit applications that require symmetry or modularity.” Sure. Who hasn’t wished for more thumbs at some point? The video accurately illustrates the advantages of the six-finger design, showing how it allows the hand to pick up an apple and an orange while leaving two fingers free to pick up … other fruit, presumably.

But then the arm gently rests itself on a table, waits a moment, and then withdraws—leaving the hand in place. It is at this point that the hand jumps and starts crawling happily on its own. Watch as two of the fingers hold two wooden blocks while the other four continue to act as legs! Surprised that three fingers are holding a bottle of mustard while the other three are taking a can of Pringles! And then try to sleep without dreaming of the terrible thing!

In all seriousness, this is clearly a unique piece of technology, and the fact that the hand is so awesome is a testament to his life and uncannily organic movements. And you can definitely see the potential applications for a device like this—the paper suggests “industrial, service, and exploration robotics” as sectors that could find a use for it, while the video continues with the unnerving prospect of a hand attached to a prosthetic limb. But it’s not the potential utility of this thing that sticks with you—it’s the sight of it crawling like the offspring of an unholy partnership between an insect and an octopus.

“Human hands are amazing tools,” gushes the accompanying text on YouTube, “but they have their limits… fundamentally, they are connected to our arms.” Well, quite a bit.