| #10: The Android |
Detailed Plot: Marco, sporting a new haircut, tries to talk Jake into morphing into dogs with him and going to an outdoor concert. Jake doesn't want to because he is against morphing for personal reasons, but Marco wears him down with promises of great music. The two of them morph into dogs and run around having fun and getting affection from the crowd, but something weird happens when they see an old classmate of theirs named Erek King passing out flyers for The Sharing. As dogs, they can't help but notice that he doesn't smell. At all. Discussing this at a meeting, the Animorphs come up with ways to investigate Erek, but their complicated strategies are busted when Cassie says it'd be most practical to just look him up in the phone book. Several of the members check out where Erek lives and don't see anything unusual, but when Marco's thinking about it he reveals that Erek was at his mother's funeral those couple of years back when she disappeared, and he remembers that Erek looked angry. Why is he working for The Sharing? Marco morphs an osprey and flies out to Erek's area with Tobias. They spy on him and watch him getting followed by bullies. Erek runs away and ends up accidentally running into the side of a bus, and for a split second they see something flicker; he doesn't look human for that split second, but they don't know what he does look like. They decide to talk to Ax, and they report to Jake on the phone. Marco has an unpleasant experience talking to Jake's brother Tom, who's a Controller, and he has to act unaffected when Tom suggests Marco come to meetings of The Sharing and bring his dad. He doesn't want the Yeerks interested in his dad--especially not when they already have his mom. Ax doesn't recognize the description of Erek as any known species, but they do decide it sounds like maybe a hologram projection since its power supply being interrupted could have caused a flicker. They decide morphing a spider would be a good way to look at Erek using visual frequencies humans don't have. Marco isn't keen on this idea because he finds spiders very creepy, but he ends up drawing the short straw and is forced to pretend he isn't particularly frightened of becoming a spider. The group flies out in bird morphs to scout out the meeting of The Sharing which Erek was advertising. Marco and Ax morph spiders, and even though they are both the same spider at the end, Marco responds to the spider instincts while Ax doesn't, and ends up hunting down a larger bug and almost killing it before Ax stops him. He wasn't overwhelmed by the instincts; he just liked giving in to them. It was a strange experience, but they decide they have work to do and go on in to the gathering. It's not long before their spider vision tells them Erek is not human: he appears to be a machine of some kind inside a hologram. Ax decides Erek is an android. Things start to go south when Marco gets eaten by a crow in his spider body, causing him to emit a public thought-speak scream that everyone at the gathering hears, and he has to morph out to escape. He has difficulty managing the morph, but after he's big enough, he escapes and falls to the ground. But then he comes upon Erek himself, who has witnessed the end of his morph and knows him to be one of the "Andalite bandits." A girl near him is made aware of this information--a girl who is introduced as Jenny--and Marco freaks because he is afraid the Yeerks will now know their whole secret. But Erek, despite his inside knowledge, apparently is not a Yeerk ally. He tells Marco to escape by morphing into something small, but he wants him to bring the group to Erek's house so they can discuss important information. Marco is afraid to trust Erek, but he feels he must; after all, Erek is in a position of power here since he can tattle about the Animorphs to Visser Three if he likes, so Marco and the others are trapped. At least it seems that whatever Erek has in store, it isn't a plan to destroy them. Marco has dinner with his father, and at that point his dad tells him why he hadn't gone into military research at any point. He talks about Marco's mother--before she was gone--and says that she warned him to stay away from the military so "they won't take you." The way he describes his mother's message, Marco knows it was a message from his mother who had caught the Yeerk in her head at a vulnerable moment and said one desperate sentence to keep her husband away from the invasion. But his dad thinks it was his mother having a bad dream. Now that his dad has begun to work on something that does intersect with the military, the Yeerks are after him. He's ignoring Marco's mother's warning. So the Animorphs go to Erek's house, leaving Rachel and Tobias outside for backup in case they need them. Marco, Ax, Cassie, and Jake go inside, and Erek's dad takes them into a secret passageway down to what looks like a giant underground field. The place is full of robots and dogs. Hundreds of dogs. Erek explains that their android race is called the Chee, and that they were created by a doglike race called the Pemalites. But a species called the Howlers wiped the Pemalites out (though their essence remains because the Chee escaped to Earth and infused the wolves on the planet with the Pemalites' essence somehow). Chee don't like the Yeerks because if they win on Earth they will wipe out the vestiges of their creators, but they can't actively fight back (despite being strong and technologically advanced) because they are programmed for nonviolence. However, if the Animorphs can get something called the Pemalite crystal for them, they can use it to reprogram themselves and join the fight. The Pemalite crystal is in the possession of the Yeerks, who are using it to run a computer system that is controlled by the same company Marco's dad is working with. The crystal is kept in a dark room that the Animorphs will have to be very creative to breach. And not all the Chee think reprogramming themselves is a good idea, because no Chee has ever killed. Rachel becomes suspicious at how long the rest of the group is taking to return, so she bursts into Erek's house in bear morph and is subdued by his dad. Erek's dad is able to hold her without harming her, but Erek points out that if Rachel had been stronger, Erek's dad would have had no choice but to just let himself be destroyed. It's clear why they might want to reprogram themselves to at least allow self-defense. They decide that they will help steal the crystal, but they plan the mission for a week away because they want some time to practice with the bat morph they're acquiring for seeing in the dark through echolocation. (The crystal is protected in a pitch-black room with security wires.) Unfortunately, Erek finds out that the Yeerks are planning on installing a more advanced security system soon, so he pressures the Animorphs to do their mission that very night. They get together, vote on it, and choose to go for it. They morph birds to get there, cockroaches and spiders to infiltrate through the vents (and get chased by a rat across a furnace, nearly incinerating themselves), and navigate in the secure room through bat echolocation. But when they get to the crystal, they realize their plan has a flaw: they don't know how they'll get the crystal out, since someone would have to carry it by mouth and a bat can't echolocate that way. They decide they have no choice but to burst out in fighting morphs and confront whatever forces the Yeerks have set. Of course, they are hopelessly outnumbered, and Marco with his gorilla morph is clutching the crystal because he has hands. They are all mortally wounded in battle, but despite Marco's guts trying to escape, he manages to get to the edge of the building and punch through the window to give Erek the crystal. Then Marco passes out. He awakes having been brought back to life by an electric shock from Erek, since he was essentially dead. He learns that the others witnessed Erek using the crystal to reprogram himself, and then he made short work of all the Controllers there. All of them, Hork-Bajir and human. And Erek immediately regrets having created memories of violence that he can never forget. He rewrites his programming again to undo what he's done to his ability to fight, and he gives the Pemalite crystal to the Animorphs and leaves. Jake and Marco end up giving the crystal to Homer, Jake's dog, who loses it in the ocean. They acknowledge that the Chee will keep fighting the war, but will do it in their own way. Narrator: Marco New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Spider (wolf), bat Marco: Dog (Irish setter), spider (wolf), bat Rachel: Bat Ax: Spider (wolf), bat Notable: It seems to be pretty common now for books to start with a main character morphing for personal reasons while knowing Jake doesn't approve. Interestingly, when Marco is discussing going to an outdoor concert and being excited about seeing Nine Inch Nails, Alanis, and the Offspring, he happens to name bands that were still recording more than ten years later, so this didn't end up dating the book as badly as most of the other pop culture references did. Marco describes morphing as "Stephen-King-meets-Ann-Rice creepy." Assuming he's talking about the real writers, the author has used the wrong spelling for "Anne." (Hey fact-checkers? Wake up.) This book contains the first time there's been any discussion of where the Animorphs' bodies go when they morph into something very small. Ax reveals in this book that their extra mass goes into Z-space, where it's possible a ship will hit it and disintegrate it. This is said to be very unlikely but possible, so it adds yet another risk factor to morphing. (Where extra mass comes from when morphing larger creatures isn't really discussed.) Erek is a major character from this point on in the books, and his name was chosen because a real Animorphs fan with that name won a contest put out by Scholastic. His full name was included, which was the prize of the contest, but if the Animorphs want to keep the secret of who they are away from the Yeerks, revealing someone's first and last name and announcing that he is an android spy is probably a bad move. Sexuality isn't mentioned very often in these books--it's only vaguely suggested to even exist, and only then in the form of acknowledging certain people's crushes--but in this book Tobias comments that he sees a couple "making out." Guess since that's not explicit, it made it past the censors. Also escaping the censors was Marco's language switch-a-roo when he said "You have us by the . . . you have us cold." Guess "You have us by the balls" would be too explicit for a kids' book; it's just odd that the author would imply such a thing. We now know about three new alien species as of this book: the Pemalites (peace-loving doglike creatures who were technologically advanced and ancient), the Chee (the immortal android creatures created by the Pemalites to assist them and be their companions, also doglike but robotic, and very strong), and the Howlers (described here only as "pure evil," very aggressive and strong, who wiped out the Pemalites and gave the remaining ones diseases). The term "Dayang trader" is also mentioned, but it's unclear as to whether "Dayang" is another type of species or whether it's some other title or term. There was an inconsistency in this book: Ax is said to have had his arm "reattached" by Erek after a battle, and he sports a scar. In order to heal physical damage inflicted by battle, a person with morphing powers can simply morph into something else, then regrow the original body without flaws; it seems odd that Ax would not have done this instead if it involved no scarring and no special procedure. This exact technique of repairing the body through morphing technique is explicitly used in later books. Another language error: "Chee" is the singular and the plural of the android race, much like "sheep." So at one point, a plural possessive used as "Chees'" doesn't fit. It should have been "Chee's," like "people's."
Best lines: Marco: These guys are very powerful, very dangerous enemies. Not like the guy in your class who keeps calling you "dork-wad." Marco: I'm totally serious. The fact that I smelled some other dog's pee on a curb was about ten thousand times more interesting to my dog brain than the squealing car was. Jake: "That's nice, Marco. Very dignified. What's next? You going to lick yourself?" Marco: Cassie has never met a dress she liked. She does not subscribe to Teen or YM. She's much more likely to buy a magazine like Smelly Animals of America. You know, the kind of magazine that would have articles like "How to Give Suppositories to Raccoons," or "Let's Examine Owl Vomit!" Marco: Rage is addictive, you know. I guess it's sorta like a drug. Anger and hatred get you high. They get you high, but like any addiction, they hollow you out and tear you down and eat you alive. Ax: "Marco? Something has happened to your hair. I believe it has become shorter. Are you suffering from some sort of illness?"
Marco: "Remind me again. Why are we doing this instead of staying home and sleeping in late?"
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