Chee

For other uses, see Chee (disambiguation).

The Chee are a fictional race of androids created by the extinct Pemalites, a race of pacifists from the sci-fi book series Animorphs, written by K. A. Applegate. The word Chee means "Friend" in the Pemalite language.

Fictional history

The Pemalites created the Chee in their own image, using their highly advanced technology to create friends that they could play with. In their natural state, the Chee androids have a humanoid structure bearing the dog-like qualities of their creators. The Chee are completely incapable of violence or assisting with any activity that would lead to someone's harm, even in their own self-defense. Due to having been designed for operation on a planet with higher gravity than Earth, the Chee possesses immense strength, speed and durability, capable of withstanding low-energy Dracon beam attacks and operating in the deep ocean. They have extremely long life spans; Erek King, the first Chee the Animorphs met in The Android, was over 50 millennia old, remarking that he has been alive since Moses wandered the Egyptian desert. Nonetheless, they are masters of espionage, often spying on the Yeerks to alert the Animorphs to their next plans.

When the Pemalites were attacked by the Howlers, and the quantum virus which destroyed their creators was released, the Chee fled to Earth, which had been previously visited by the doglike pacifists. With only a few Pemalites barely clinging to life when they landed, the Chee managed to bind those Pemalites' "essences" with those of several wolves; from this combination, the modern dog was born. The Chee went into hiding on Earth, passing as human beings, watching humans evolve alongside them. The Chee can be considered benevolent Doppelgängers, as they can alter their appearance to match that of anything they wish, living or not. They accomplish this by means of a hologram generator. Erek and the other Chee often aid the Animorphs by standing in for them whenever they must undertake long missions, where they will be gone from home for longer than a few hours.

There has been only one time when a Chee has ever killed a living being; in book #10, The Android, the Animorphs manage to capture a device that allows a Chee to alter its programming — the Pemalite Crystal, which is in fact a computer of such advanced design that it would theoretically be able to control every computer on Earth, presumably utilizing the existing worldwide web, yet is only about the size of a marble or a pearl. When the Animorphs retrieved the device from the Yeerk-run Matcom facility, Erek was able to use it on himself and managed to save his friends from certain death at the hands of more than 25 human-controllers armed with machine guns and 25 elite Hork-Bajir warriors; he effectively slaughtered them in less than 10 seconds. The eternally vivid memory of this action - his android memory meaning that the horror and brutality of what he did to the Hork-Bajir would remain as fresh in his mind as it had been when he first committed it - so disturbed and disgusted Erek, that he restored the failsafes against violence in his programming after having saved the Animorphs' lives, vowing to never harm anything ever again. Marco, who was the one holding the crystal, eventually passed the crystal to Jake's dog, Homer, who cast the Pemalite crystal into the ocean, and no news of it has been heard since.

Appearance

The Chee are described in Book 10 by Marco as "made of steel and something white," with "mouths almost like muzzles, clumsy-looking legs, and stubby fingers." When Erek hits the side of a passing bus, Marco sees "something that seem[s] to be made of patches of steel and milk-white plastic." As a spider, Marco is able to see through Erek's hologram, and he describes the foot as "interlocking plates of steel and ivory," and the foot looks like a dog's paw. On the whole, Chee look like upright digitigrade robotic dogs, possibly resembling Greyhounds.