Animorphs #10: The Android Plot: Marco finds one of his old friends, Erek King. But somehow he seems strange. Different. Then he finds out Erek's been hanging with some of the kids at The Sharing and passing out fliers for the orginazation. In his investigation, the Animorphs discover an alien secret kept hidden for thousands of years . . .

Main Plot Points:

• There are a race of androids called the Chee who have a vast underground system to help their cherished dogs and work against the Yeerks -- they can fake being Controllers.
• The Yeerks control a computer company called Matcom. Their goal is to infiltrate and rewrite all the software of all computers on Earth. This would leave humans more vulnerable than any Y2K problem could cause, and could help them gain control of Earth.
• Also left over from the Pemalite civilization is a crystal salvaged by a Daynag trader, an incredibly advanced processor, which can execute programs such as take over every networked computer on Earth or rewrite Chee programming.

Characters Introduced:

• Erek King, Marco's friend when they were younger, a Chee
• Mr. King, a Chee posing as Erek's father
• Chee-Ionos, posing as a human named Maria, seemingly a sort of elder
• A Daynag, a trader, though

Morphs:

• Irish setter (Marco)
• Wolf spider (Ax, Marco)
• Bat

Personality Conflicts:

• Marco is starting to experience problems with rage. He becomes horribly angry when Tom invites him and his father to The Sharing -- his mother, in a moment of freedom, warned his father about staying away from certain lines of work, but his dad disregarded the warning, calling it the remnants of a nightmare. So he figures the Yeerks are after his father, now.
• Chee-Ionos, a.k.a. Maria, gives Marco a poigniant plea to not retreive the Pemalite crystal: "While humans and Yeerks and Andalites and Hork-Bajir and a million other species on a million worlds warred and slaughtered and conquered, we remained at peace. Would you end all that? Would you make us killers too?" And what is Marco's answer? "Yes, ma'am, I guess I would." He explains that he'll do whatever it takes to defeat the Yeerks, and if the Chee had fought thousands of years ago they wouldn't be "'living with dogs in a big underground kennel.' I didn't mention the sudden interest The Sharing had in my father. I didn't want to make this personal." Little too late than that.

Notes and Observations:

• The Animorphs learn about the morphing and Zero-space connection from Ax. There's also kind of a foreshadowing thing for #18.
• Marco's mom warned, "They won't get you if you stay away from the military." This might imply that maybe she, too, was working in military or intelligence or computers or some other such area. Whatever it was, it was probably the group of people the Yeerks made first contact with. They probably captured all of them as their first batch of humans and Visser One, being in charge of the Earth invasion at the time, infested the first available human so she could learn about the planet. And that just happened to be Marco's mom.
• The Chee, even though they are not programmed for violence, are incredibly strong because the Pemalite homeworld had a gravity four times as strong as Earth's, and the Chee are made to function normally in it and would naturally have an easy time on Earth.
• Erek notes of the Pemalite's demise: "The Howlers had unleashed germ weapons. The Pemalites were doomed. But we Chee, we androids, were unnafected." So the Howlers had a biological weapon that would destroy an entire race. They're an advanced species, so normally this wouldn't be a big deal, except a little thing about them we learn in #26. Their "germ weapons" seem strangely similar to the Andalite quantum virus. The only difference is that the Howler's weapons were purely organic, having absolutly no effect on the android Chee, while the Andalite viruses were pieces of technology, or maybe a melding of technology and organisim. A quantum virus, in theory, might be able to attack a non-organic race like the Chee, though from the explainations of how it works, it seems to need to be programmed to a certain race's biology, which the Chee have none of. Nevertheless, they're still very much alike. Could they have had similar inspiration derived from a certain omnicient, red-eyed being?

Comments:
This book is excellent, very well-written (even though I don't usually care for Marco-books) and very impactive. Oh, and it introduces the Chee. The only problem with it is that it's a little slow in the beginning.  If you don't want to read this book, you're going to be irritated every time they say more than two sentences about the Chee up until #27. 

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