Living with Sandy and Vanessa is longtime friend Rhian Chu, a League AI GI with strong maternal desires. Android Rhian wants to adopt a human baby, while male fashion designer Tojo wants to give android Sandy a makeover, commenting that evolution is about survival of the species and hence Sandy needs to wear fashionable outfits to attract a mate. Complicating matters is Sandy's human lover, Special Agent Ari Ruben, who discovers that the League fused a killswitch into her brainstem. Activated by an attack code of unknown dimension, the killswitch will shut Sandy down, forever, and there's no way to remove it.

The reader is told that Sandy's cyber-brain is made of "micro-filament" material that "replicates human brain synapse activity almost precisely ... and can integrate with synaptic implants almost seamlessly." The League continues its advanced neurology research, and it's possible that its scientists have created a new, enhanced version of Sandy.

Ari eventually learns that the new, enhanced android already exists and is a rogue GI from Earth. The new droid is out to kill Sandy, and it exists solely to fight. It does not have Sandy's conscience. Sandy must go on the run.

Will Sandy and her friends defeat the rogue android? Will Sandy be turned off forever by the killswitch? Will Rhian be allowed to adopt a human baby? Will Sandy find true love and a meaningful humanlike existence with Ari? Finally, what does it mean to be an artificially intelligent sentient creature?

Rich characterization, thin plot

Joel Shepherd delivers an android character that's richer in human emotions than most real humans. Cassandra "Sandy" Kresnov is empathetic toward her friends, both android and human. She thinks that she's in love with her human boyfriend, Ari Ruben, and she's sure that she likes sex with him. Yet sex with Sandy is literally like sex with a machine, and when she gets excited, she has to be careful not to destroy the bed—or Ari.

While the novel offers amusing banter and circumstances, the expanse of 544 pages drags from lack of plot. Readers may find that the book is a stretch of dialogue interspersed with chunks of action-movie fighting. It's unfortunate, because the strength of the novel, which lies in the character of Cassandra Kresnov, is full of promise.

The android technology in Killswitch is standard fare in science-fiction books and movies. Sandy has a cybernetic memory; she learns rapidly; she looks human but fights like a machine; she uses uplinks and can scan data, zoom in and pan, and sift through mountains of information. Like Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and most androids in American media and Japanese anime, Sandy wants to be treated like a human, she wants human rights, she wants respect, and she wants human emotions.

These ideas range all the way back to 1927's Metropolis, a silent film directed by Fritz Lang, in which machine-human robot Maria is designed to take over human functions. In the U.S. version of the film, the machine-human, or automaton, is sentient and foments revolution, and also happens to be an exotic dancer. In fact, as far back as 1921, machines were shown as becoming sentient and rebelling against humans; witness Karel Capek's play Rossum's Universal Robots. Cassandra Kresnov is such a delightful character that the reader wants to see her push beyond the tropes of science-fiction androids.