This is the 10th book in the Animorph series; Marco is the main character!

In this book, Marco and the group find out that their former classmate, Erek, is not what he seems! I am not giving anything away by saying that Erek is an android. Look at the book's cover! LOL

Anyway, Erek tells the group that the Yeerks have put together a computer program that will transmit a virus throughout ALL of Earth's computers; the Yeerks will control all the computers in the world!

Worse for Marco, is that his Father has been asked to work on it; Marco definitely doesn't want his Father being anywhere near the Yeerks! To say that Marco was angry is an understatement!

"It was a sick feeling. It was sick, and I knew it.

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.

I guess I knew all of that. But all I could think of was that they were NOT getting my father."

The Animorphs decide to retrieve the Pemalite Crystal, from the Yeerks, and it is their most daring and scary mission yet! They would most certainly have died if Erek had not.....

After the battle, Erek is forever changed. He asks Marco, "How do you live with the memory?"

"I knew what he meant. See, win or lose, right or wrong. The memory of violence sits inside your head. It sits there. like some lump you can't quite swallow. It sits there, a black hole that darkens hope, and eats away at everyday happiness like a cancer. It's the shadow you take into your own heart and try to live with."

These words were written back in 1997, but they ring so true these days! With the Corona Pandemic and the George Floyd murder and riots, people need to remember what violence does - physically, mentally, and emotionally!

I look forward to reading the next book in the series!

Animorphs Forever!

the one where the animorphs agree to introduce sin to the garden of eden, aka help robots break the first law of robotics, aka give an inherently pacifist culture the capability of violence and thereby give it guilt and moral responsibility.

This is from Marco's point of view. If I thought the last one was chilling. This one takes the cake.

Marco and Jake enter a concert as dogs and notice one of their classmates handing out pamphlets of The Sharing. They also notice he has no scent. They decide to investigate further and find out he's an Android. He suprises them and invites them to his house to explain everything. Apparently there is a race of Android on the Earth called Chee and they got created by the Pemalites, a very peaceful species, that got wiped out thousands of years ago. A few escaped together with their Chee to Earth millenia ago. But they were infected and died shortly after. The Chee transferred their essence to wolfs and in doing so created dogs. The Chee are programmed to be nonviolent, but some of them are fighting the Yeerks by infiltrating them, because they too want to save the planet. Erek, the classmate, asks the Animorphs to help steal a crystal that would enable him to change his programming and join their fight. The crystal is old Pemalite tech. The group manages to get the crystal but are almost killed on their way out. At the last moment Marco manages to give the crystal to Erek, who rewrites his programming and rescues them. Chee are very strong and technologically advanced. He kills everyone in the room, which is not described, but hinted as having been very brutal and gruesome. Afterwards he's deeply shaken, reverses the changes and surrenders the crystal back to Marco.

This one, man. Is it okay, to make a species, that survived without violence, without killing for millenia, into murderers? Even if it's to safe yourself. Even when their creators suffered a similar fate as you will? What do you do with the memory of having killed someone. Especially if you cannot forget anything and cannot die because your an android. The last pages of this book were truly horrific. It's hard to put into words, because Applegate already did it much better, so just go and read for yourself. Have fun.

Favorite sentence:
"I realized then why the Pemalites had forbidden their creatures to kill. The Chee lived forever. Forever was a long time to remember what Erek had done.
'I'm sorry,' I said."

Aaahh

So I dropped the ball on this one, and finished this book gosh, nearly two months ago. Makes me glad I already pulled my quotes and did a brief review specifically for the audiobook version here! I think by the quotes I pulled, it’s easier to see where my mind was with this book:

[Violence is] the shadow you take into your own heart and try to live with.

It really does a great job addressing the lure (or avoidance) of violence and the ramifications on oneself – namely, one’s mental health, one’s spiritual health, basically the emotional wounds it leaves. On the flip side, it also addresses what a fully-evolved species might be like – and it’s so very, very hopeful: pacificsm, kindness, a desire to play and have fun and just love one another unconditionally. Something that we need more of in this world. It’s also interesting that it is in a Marco book that we get this exposure – “love one another” is more of a Cassie theme – but that is also what makes it work so well. Marco is the Animorph with the cold, analytical mind (well, that’s how his character progresses through the series). This unconditional love is so very opposite to his character that it makes for a good counterbalance for the events of this book and how Marco deals with them. And it also makes for some really, really great things to think about and lines to quote.

Favorite quotes:
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. – page 45

You have us by the… you have us cold.” – page 86 – Hm, I wonder what Marco almost said here? I’m inclined to think it is bordering on expletive, or at least too much for Scholastic in the late 90s. But which one? Balls?

“We want you to trust us,” Erek said. “We know that you’re suspicious. You have to be. I’m sure you’ve left some of your people outside, just in case we betray you. I wanted us to be equal. I wanted you to know our secrets, since we know yours.” – page 100

“[The Pemalites] loved to play. They loved games and jokes and laughter. And they had been a fully evolved race for so long that all the harsher instincts were gone from them. They had no evil in their hearts. They had no evil in their souls.” – page 102 – If only…this would be a wonderful world to be a part of.

[Tobias said, < The Chee’ve] survived without killing. Doesn’t something about that make you jealous? Don’t you wish we could say the same? Don’t you wish Homo Sapiens could face the universe and honestly say, “We do not kill? We don’t enslave. We don’t make war”? > - page 121

We were going to lose.
We were going to die.
And life, any kind of life almost, is so much better than being dead. – page 157

See, win or lose, right or wrong, the memory of violence sits inside your head. It sits there, like some lump you can’t quite swallow. It sits there, a black hole that darkens hope, and eats away at everyday happiness like a cancer. It’s the shadow you take into your own heart and try to live with. – page 164

Original Review: May 20, 2015
How come I didn't really remember the tough exchanges like the last quote under the cut from when I read these books as a kid? Mostly I just remembered the morphing, the fighting of the Yeerks, among a few other details, but not just how much time is spent on the emotional impact all of this fighting has on the Animorphs. Regular nightmares, the horrible things they see and even do, all to protect humanity. These books really do have more depth and potential for discussion than many children's books, and are so very worth the read. I think it would be great for some of these books to be read in class, and then for there to be discussion as a group/small group about the topics and themes present in the series.

    Marco is writing his English paper during lunch before class:
    "Topic -- the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content," Jake said. -- page 29

    People were just ovals of black, brown, blond, and red hair to me. That's mostly what a person looks like from a hundred feet up. A hair oval.
    I have never felt as totally alive as when I'm in a hawk morph. Tobias doesn't have it all that bad, in some ways. There are so many worse animals to be. -- page 34

    [Right after Marco has just talked to Tom, who was trying to suggest Marco and his dad come to The Sharing's outing at the lake.)
I could feel the rate flowing through me, the blind, violent rage that became little films in my head -- little head-movies of revenge and destruction. I pictured the things I would do to Tom...to Chapman... someday even to Visser Three. I would do terrible things to them. Terrible, violent things.
    It was a sick feeling. It was sick, and I knew it, and yet I ran those images over and over in my head.
    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.
    I guess I knew all that. But all I could think of was that they were not getting my father.
    So I ran the scenes of violence over and over in my head. I rode that rush of fury till at last it burned itself out and left me feeling empty and beaten. -- page 45

    Cassie stood up. Then, as an afterthought, she brushed off her knees. "Baby opossums," she said, by way of explanation. "Too big for the pouch, not ready to leave the den."
    "Don't tell Tobias," I said. "He'll eat 'em."
    /I already know about them,/ Tobias said.
    I looked up in surprise. He was in the tree above me. I hadn't heard him arrive.
    Cassie shrugged. "Tobias is a hawk. He has a right to be a hawk." Then she looked up at Tobias and smiled. "Of course, they are awfully cute."
    /Oh, man,/ Tobias groaned. /Okay, okay, this litter is off-limits. Happy now?/
    "You're a sweetheart, Tobias," Cassie said. -- page 48

    Ax, in a harrier morph, Jake, in his peregrine falcon morph, and I flew on toward the lake, though still far apart.
    /You know, one of your kind tried to kill me the other day,/ I said to Jake.
    /Tobias told me,/ Jake said. /Gotta watch out. Falcons rule./
    /Yeah, well, I noticed he didn't try it a second time./
    /Don't diss falcons,/ Jake said.
    /One-on-one in a fair fight, an osprey would kick your butt./
    /As if,/ Jake sneered.
    /Excuse me,/ Ax interrupted. /Is there some special meaning to this conversation that I don't understand?/
    /Yeah,/ I said. /The meaning is that Jake and I are scared, so we're babbling in a desperate effort not to think about it./
    /Ah. I am frightened, too. I don't really like morphing tiny animals. I keep thinking about all the rest of my mass./
[Ax explains about how mass goes into Zero-space when you morph something small, and how it could potentially get hit by a spaceship.]
    /Of course no ship would actually hit a floating mass,/ Ax said, talking to us like we were nitwits. /The ship's shielding systems would disintegrate the mass. That's what troubles me about doing small morphs. It very seldom happens. The odds are millions to one. But it could happen./
    Jake and I thought about this for awhile. About a spaceship "disintegrating" some big was of our mass. It was not a pretty picture.
    /Hey, Ax?/ Jake said. /You know how we wanted you to be honest with us? To tell us everything you know?/
    /Yes, Prince Jake./
    /Small change. In the future, don't tell us things that will scare us silly just as we're going into possible battle./
    /A big was of Marco in Zero-space,/ I muttered. /Like hanging your butt out of a car window, waiting for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off./ -- page 59-61

[Ax and Marco are in wolf spider morph, and Ax just interrupted Marco before he could bite into a cockroach, asking him what he was doing.]
    /Nothing. I was just letting the spider be a spider.> It was a pretty good answer, I though. /I guess its instincts kind of carried me away./
    /Marco, I morphed the identical spider,/ Ax said.
    I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly swell up inside me. /Ax, it was just a cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job to do./
    /Sometimes humans worry me,/ Ax said.
    I didn't ask him what he meant. Why had I gotten so into the hunt? Why hadn't I resisted the urge?
    I flashed on the rage I'd felt when I talked to Tom. Was that it? -- page 73

    There are two kinds of thought-speak. Private, which is like whispering right in one person's ear, and public, which is like yelling. -- page 78
-- I'm glad that the Animorphs were able to figure out how to do the two different types of thought-speak on their own, because man would they have been in trouble if the Yeerks could hear them all the time...


    "HhhhRRAAAAWWRRR!" Rachel [in grizzly morph] roared in rage and frustration [inside Erek's living room].
    Frustration, see, because the Chee who passed as Erek's father had her in a full nelson. His human-holograph arms were wrapped around the unbelievably massive shoulders of the grizzly, and he was actually holding the great bear still.
    He had pinned a grizzly so powerful it could literally turn a Toyota into an aluminum can.
    "Okay, now I've seen everything," I said. -- page 117

    "Fight or die," I agreed. [...]
    "Law of the jungle," Rachel said. "You eat or you get eaten."
    /Maybe so,/ Tobias said, speaking up for the first time. /But still, wouldn't it be nice if that wasn't the law?/ -- page 121 -- All the more poignant because it is Tobias saying this.

    /See? We should never get cocky,/ Cassie said. /It's tempting the irony gods./
    /Irony gods?/ Ax asked.
    /Yeah,/ Cassie said. /The bitter spirits who wait around till you get cocky, then hammer you./ -- page 147-8

    [After Erek the Chee has killed all the Hork-Bajir and human Controllers to help the Animorphs get out.]
    "You okay, man?" I asked him.
    He looked at me with holographic human eyes. Maybe he had to choose to make them cry. Maybe he had to choose to give them that empty, hollow look. I don't know what that connection is between the android Chee and his projected human body. But his expression answered my question.
    No. Erek was not okay.
    "You saved our lives, Erek," I said.
    "How do you ... how do you live with the memory?" he asked me.
    I knew what he meant. See, win or lose, right or wrong, the memory of violence sits inside your head. It sits there, like some lump you can't quite swallow. It sits there, a black hole that darkens hope, and eats away at everyday happiness like a cancer. It's the shadow you take into your own heart and try to live with. -- page 163-4

Ik weet eindelijk de waarheid over honden❤️

“See, win or lose, right or wrong, the memory of violence sits inside your head. It sits there, like some lump you can't quite swallow. It sits there, a black hole that darkens hope, and eats away at everyday happiness like a cancer. It's the shadow you take into your own heart and try to live with.”

With the introduction of a new race of androids and their role in this war, we explore how grief and violence haunt the mind.

This is a children’s middle grade series.

The Android was always one of my favorite Animorphs books when I was a kid because, even before I knew what it was, I loved worldbuilding in fiction. This is one of the reasons I love serialized storytelling so much, because serialized stories (no matter the medium) are the ones that have the most room to deepen and define their fictionalized worlds without sacrificing character or theme. And The Android does quite a bit of worldbuilding in a short period of time.

We're introduced to several important new concepts, like zero-space (or z-space), which is where ships travel at faster than light speeds, and also happens to be one of the secrets behind the morphing technology. Ax lets it slip to Marco that due to the laws of physics, when morphing an animal smaller in mass than yourself, the mass has to go SOMEWHERE, and that somewhere is z-space, and there is an infinitesimal but still possible chance that a ship in z-space might hit your extruded mass and vaporize it, thus causing you to become stuck in your morph forever. This is not a pleasant thought for the Animorphs, but it is a cool bit of sci-fi. (They don't inquire further, and I can't remember if we get answers in the future, but what happens when you morph an animal with a larger mass? Does it pull in excess matter from z-space? If so, whose mass are they borrowing?)

But I'm burying the lede, here. It's Marco's old friend Erek and his "family" who are the real focus. Because Erek turns out not to be human, and he might even be involved with The Sharing somehow. The Animorphs end up doing recon at a Sharing retreat, but end up exposing themselves when Marco gets eaten by a crow, and he has to demorph in front of Erek. But Erek doesn't immediately betray them to the Yeerks. Instead, he tells them to meet at his house in a few days, that they are allies in the fight against the Yeerks, and promises to explain everything.

And man, is it ever a weird explanation.

Erek is an android, a robotic artificially intelligent being. He and his "family" are called The Chee, which was a name given to them by their creators, the Pemalites, an extinct race of pacifist aliens who died out 50,000 years before. They pass as humans using advanced holographic technology, and they have been doing so since humans developed civilization. They, too, are pacifist by design. The Pemalites programmed so they could never hurt another living creature. Only some of them, like Erek, are frustrated by their limitations, and want to be able to join the fight against the Yeerks. They enlist the help of the Animorphs to steal a Pemalite crystal in Yeerk control, not only to keep it out of Yeerk hands, but to use it to re-write their programming.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but the way Applegate handles it is an example of why I love this series so much. Erek and his friends see the war with the Yeerks happening, but feel like their programming prevents them from getting involved in the fighting. But there are some Chee who do not wish to overturn their programming, who believe that nonviolence is the best option. The Animorphs unsurprisingly take Erek's side. Nonviolence is nice and all, but from their perspective, they can't afford philosophical stances when real lives are at stake. Marco's dad is in danger of being made a Controller for his work. Jake's brother already is one. Marco's mom is Visser One, and his whole life was torn apart because of it. Things will only get worse if the Yeerks aren't stopped, and stopping them is not something that can be accomplished with nonviolence.

Basically, the book acknowledges that the ethics of nonviolence, especially in a time of war, are not black and white. They're grey as hell. This is made especially clear when Erek does rewrite his programming in the midst of battle in order to save the Animorphs from certain death, but in doing so, he kills twenty Hork-Bajir and human Controllers (both the Yeerks and their innocent hosts), and he does so in an unbelievably brutal fashion. And because he's an android, the memory of doing so will never leave him. Saving the Animorphs, who are pivotal figures in the conflict to come, whose survival may mean the difference between a Yeerk victory and defeat, was the right call, but it also meant killing innocent beings, which is something that can't be celebrated and shouldn't be forgotten.

There's also some little stuff in here, both funny and serious that deserves a mention. The Pemalites, and the alien race that destroyed them, the Howlers, are not just one-off aliens. They will both come back, and we will learn much more about them. We don't get much regarding the Howlers here, but any race that destroys what are essentially intelligent dogs is big trouble. Speaking of dogs, the only thing left of the Pemalites,, it's sad and so weird that the Chee want to save Earth not for humans, but for dogs. I haven't mentioned much about Marco in this review, but he was a nice way in to this story. His investment in the fight has steadily deepened, and his protectiveness and anger over his family is starting to affect the way he goes into missions. Aside from Ax, he's also lost the most to the Yeerks, even if Jake is the only one (and now Erek) who knows about it. He also got a new haircut in this one, which he agonizes over at length throughout the book, but it turns out that the reason he got the haircut is that Scholastic had a new, cute model they wanted to use for Marco, but he had short hair. So Applegate gave him a haircut. Behind the scenes!

Next up, time stuff!

I’m rewriting this review because I recently re-watched the episode based on this book, and I realised how little it holds up. If Netflix was to pick another kid’s show to turn into an edgy drama, this would be it. It’s the one show/book series that I think could be made really good if redone. I mean, it has some pretty serious themes, and the concept has so much room to mess around with. Plus, the characters are pretty solid. Anyway, back to my thoughts lol. Not me becoming unironically invested in this series:
I am upset. Erek is lame. It seems like violence is fine until the main characters can put themselves at a disadvantage by suddenly becoming morally righteous--It’s exactly like when the Andalite that Visser Three controls was like “pls kill me homies” and they DON’T. I was SO mad. Like yeah, that’s sad, but he literally lives in agony being controlled, and if they could kill Visser Three’s host, it would put ALL the yeerks at a disadvantage because it would skew the whole politics of the invasion and question the hierarchy of power (his andalite host is literally what makes him intimidating/powerful. AND he’s the ONLY yeerk to have an andalite host!) But instead they do nothing because??? URGHH--Anyways. Even if the androids like Erek aren’t “programmed for violence” it seems awfully weird that, a species (?) that has existed for CENTURIES, wouldn’t, even if not participating in it, at least have some grasp of the gravity of warfare and destruction, especially when they are able to project their planet’s massacre at will, they are not totally unaware of it. So, when Erek had a meltdown after saving the gang (albeit killing a lot of ppl and aliens in the process) it felt very disjointed. I feel like they would understand the necessity of violence to prevent greater violence, unless there’s just some overarching transcendence of the futility of it all or something that was unclear to me. It just seems odd that it isn’t until after murdering a bunch of controllers that he’s like “nah violence is bad after all.” As if he wouldn’t already know that. And sure, you could argue that it wasn’t until after killing someone that the guilt or severity of it clicked, but with the sheer power and infiltration of all the androids that already live on earth, it seems very rude to just cop out like that. Especially when Marco and the others are getting their stomachs literally sliced open on the regular for this war. And they’re in middle school!!! They don’t get that choice, Erek.
It also seems that, if the crystal can rewrite the android’s programming system, they should be able to program it so that they can delete their memories of violence (if that’s the issue here.
Aren’t the androids based on dogs, though? I’ve watched a dog pick up a gopher by its head and swing it around until the body flew away, fully detached, like…? That’s another thing, they say the alien’s essence is what caused dogs to diverge from wolves but like...dogs r kinda mean still. I don’t know. I would say, even if dogs seem happy and oblivious, they’re still very much a violent species. If a group of middle schoolers can hold up their weight in the war and almost die horribly every book (with a very large mental toll, ur not special Erek) I think Erek and the androids could pull their weight a little bit more. Not even with violence, their sheer power would literally already be enough to intimidate Visser Three and the Yeerks to yeet outta there like??? Is no one thinking about that??? It just seems like a very inconvenient oversight not to take advantage of that power, even if you don’t choose to use it.
Erek definitely had a very Mrs. Macbeth moment, and I felt bad for him, but it was also frustrating that there was so much irony there in the way that he literally quoted Shakespeare when we first met him. He says he watched the first production of Hamlet (we get it, ur old), but Hamlet is LITERALLY about power play? And the morality of murder? Sure, it doesn’t end well (from an outside point of view, at least. Is poisoning considered violence?), but Hamlet arguably chooses to die, and he decides to be the force of judgement in the situation. It’s just very frustrating that the solution is right there and they don’t take it. If the show follows the books, though, I’m excited to read the next ones because Ax getting a job is my favourite thing.

FIRST REVIEW / MAR 15, 2015
The last time I reread this book, just a few years ago, I was reduced to ridiculous weeping over the ending. I looooove tales of alien species and their A.I. companions (don't get me started on the tears I've shed for the Geth in Mass Effect), so this is up my alley: something about the Pemalites and Chee and dogs just really, really hit close to home and left me staggered. The mission starts off cool and awesome (I am perpetually in favour of anything that is like a pitch-black heist, sneaking through air vents and stealing a priceless jewel and all!!), and the second half of it turns horrifying, terrifying, the stuff of which nightmares is made of -- the image of Marco looking down and looking directly into his own insides is something that stuck with me ever since I read this in my childhood.

Erek King is one of my favourite minor characters in this series, and what happens in this book breaks my heart. Marco's livid anger over the Yeerks targeting his father is also gutting, revealing the poisonous toll that this war is having on all of them -- all of the Animorphs obviously feel that anger at times, but that poisonous, strangling, out-of-control rage was very similar to what Rachel described in her previous book. I love seeing the different costs this war is having on them (e.g. Jake's is more inward-directed and self-flagellating; heavy is the head that wears the crown).

The direct status quo might not have changed by the end of this book, but the worldbuilding has just taken another big expansion -- there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, indeed -- as it's revealed that it's not just them fighting, there are other chess pieces in play, and they've now gained a valuable ally.

---------------------------------

SECOND REVIEW / MAR 9, 2020
There's not much I can add to my previous review because I already hit on the most prevailing notes, but suffice it to say: yep, this book remains one of my early favourites in the series!

I also just love how Erek King is both an incredibly wise and ancient being but also having to pretend to be a teenager, but he's also incredibly invested in this war. His sacrifice and trauma at the end-- ugh. My heart. And the Chee and Pemalites are so great!!

That last terrifying fight at the very end, just, woof. That moment when Marco is looking around at all his friends and can't understand why they're not jubilant about having survived, with the sound of Erek crying softly in the background, but it only sinks in for Marco when he sees tears in Rachel's eyes, too.

Some separate but important details to take note of, for down the line: 1) the Howlers, 2) the logistics of morph mass going into Z-space, and 3) how far Marco will go to protect his sole remaining parent.

Favourite quotes moved to Google Docs.

Considering Marco is the goofball of the group and often the comic relief, his books always end up pretty damn serious and dealing with heavy issues. I always love his narration, and yeah, I really like this one. It does a lot to strengthen Marco's reasons for fighting in a way that isn't overbearing, and I also deeply respect how deftly the issue of shades of gray in a war are handled. It delved deeply into the them of peace versus war, without sounding preachy about it like Cassie's books usually do. It makes sense, makes the reader feel what Marco feels, and I have to respect that.

Bonus points for making it that dogs are descended from joyful aliens. :D

Holy crap!