I think there's a glitch where if you ever had EDE & Arcade together (or something) and then fire Arcade, this will happen when you try to rehire him (even if you don't have EDE anymore).
(quote from the Arcade wiki page:)
--After recruiting him then attempting to recruit him while you have another team member, might make the dialog to recruit him without another companion vanish. (ie; if you talk to him at the lucky 38 without a partner after trying to recruit him with one, you will not see the option [I think we should travel together] anymore.) To fix this glitch, remove both companions from your group (both humanoid and non-humanoid) then the option should appear again.
--The above fix may not always work, as he will say something along the lines of "You have quite the menagerie at your disposal", and the game will say that you can only have two companions at a time. The only fix currently is to load a previous save (happened after recruiting Arcade, then immediately firing him to get access to a previous companion's inventory, then trying to recruit again). However, before all hope is lost, try talking to him with ED-E, Rex, and neither. Because he has different dialogue options for each situation, one of them might be triggered (confirmed fix multiple times by adding Rex).