Chee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

The Pemalites created the Chee in their own image, using their highly advanced technology to create friends that they could play with. 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, was over 50 millennia old.

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. Erek King 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. 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 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. Jake eventually passed the crystal to his dog, Homer, who cast the Pemalite crystal into the ocean, and no news of it has been heard since.