Free The Alex Crow by Andrew Smith

inventions.
    Max went on, “Did you ever hear of a Russian scientist named Vladimir Demikhov?”
    â€œAre you just making that up?” Larry asked.
    â€œNo. He was a real person. My father used to tell me stories about him. He was fucking insane. One of the things Demikhov was famous for was something he did to dogs. He used to surgically attach extra heads to dogs. He would make dogs with two living heads, that could eat, and everything.”
    â€œThat’s fucking
sick
,” Cobie Petersen said.
    Although what Demikhov did to dogs was sick, Cobie Petersen used the American teenage slang version of the word
sick
, which meant that attaching extra heads to dogs was something Cobie Petersen admired very much.
    And Cobie Petersen added, “That means he’d have to actually
cut the heads off
living dogs to do it, right?”
    Max nodded.
    â€œHow many heads did your cat have?” Cobie asked.
    â€œJust one. It wasn’t
that
kind of invention my dad was working on. Demikhov was stupid. Nobody wants a dog with two fucking heads.”
    Cobie Petersen raised his hand, an earnest look in his eyes. “I would. I would want a two-headed dog.”
    Max shook his head. “The cat did have extra toes, though. His feet were as big around as billiard balls, but that wasn’t something my dad did, either. The cat was born that way. But the cat was really weird, too, because they had done all this tinkering around inside his head and body. Mechanical stuff and things with computers that were made from synthetic animal tissue that you’d never know were in there, but they changed him so much he didn’t really
act
like a regular cat. Maybe that’s just because he was fucked up on the inside. But I’ll be honest; he seemed depressed, like he didn’t want to live. And he didn’t sleep all the time, or chase bugs and mice and birds like normal cats, either. He just sat around staring and staring and staring at us. The cat—Alex—was one of the first versions of what my dad’s company calls a
biodrone
. They were made to spy on people, and to do worse things, too.”
    â€œSo? What’s so scary about that?” Larry said.
    â€œBiodrones are made to kill people,” Max said. “And you’d never know it. Some fucker could be sitting at a computer screen at Alex Division, listening to you, maybe watching you
vaporize your excess anxiety
, and then press a button, and—
poof! kablooey!
—you’re done.”
    Everyone got very quiet when Max said that. There was only the crackling of the fire and the metronomic rustling of Robin Sexton’s rocking in the dirt.
    â€œIt’s a creepy thing,” Max said. “Because when most people think of spy drones, they think of things that follow you around and you don’t know about them. Biodrones are things that
people
follow around—like pets—and you never know what they’re actually doing. It’s a safe bet that Alex Division has probably made biodrones out of people, too.”
    Then Max glanced at me, and said, “What do
you
think, Ariel?”
    What could I say?
    â€œWhy did your dad bring it home if it was made to kill people?” Cobie Petersen asked.
    â€œThey were just testing it out, to see how well it performed, and if it fit in with a family,” Max explained. “In the lab, they could actually hear and watch on monitors whatever the cat was looking at or listening to.”
    â€œDid you
know
it was spying on you?” Cobie said.
    Max shook his head. “No. Not until afterward. Neither did my mom. But that’s just normal, everyday shit in our house.”
    â€œDid it—you know—did the cat ever catch you
punching the clown
?”
    Once again, the things American boys felt at ease talking about mortified me.
    â€œDude. Don’t be an idiot. I was eight years old.”
    â€œSo?” Cobie said.
    Max cleared his