Zoology

Until I got here, I never thought about attractive chimpanzees.

Consider: to me, all chimps look much the same; human enough to be hideous, but not in a way that makes one ape much more or less ugly than the next. I look at them, and ultimately they’re just animals; one individual blends to the other as I look at them in their cage. That’s just what they are, to me.

But, of course, that isn’t the case for them. I look at two chimps, and can’t distinguish between them— a chimp looks at them both, and one is astonishing in her beauty and the other so hideous she makes you want to retch. Attraction seems so universal when you feel it. But beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and most of the world’s beholders were never human. And that’s clearer than ever, now I’m the only human there is.

Oh, the people here still call themselves human, out here in the distant future. But they’re different enough to the people I knew that “human” is the last word we’d use to describe them. They are long, but somehow fat as well; they are ponderously slow as they drag their enormous heads along the ground. When they speak, they do it with mouths that are long and toothy in a way that makes me retch. The people here do not look like people, not any more. They look almost human in a way that is totally inhuman. They remind me of chimps, of animals.

But they are not the animals here. When I arrived people talked to me, listened to my fears. But they still experimented on me, and they still put me in a cage. I was part of an ancestor race, and they said they respected that. But eventually I realised they were talking to me in the way our people would talk to a dog. I could understand a tiny amount of their world – like a chimp could understand a tiny amount of mine – but nothing like enough to be welcomed into it as an equal. I have some rights, and I retain some dignity. But in the end, I am still seen as an animal, and in the end I still remain in my tiny cage.

There are no humans like me in the world anymore. If another were to come here they would think me the most beautiful creature here, though in my time I was anything but. If we were to engage in a contest of strength with our captors we could shatter their stupid bones, mash their bodies into pulp. But the chimps of our time could have broken the strongest of us, and by animal standards they were also geniuses. And brains always triumph against brawn, and evolution is always about the brains you have relative to the other creatures in the world. Strength didn’t matter, and the brains we had weren’t enough. That was always the case for them, and now it’s the case for me.

When I was young in the fossilised past, people in my school used to challenge evolution. Some of them were stupid, but I don’t think all of them were: the fear I saw in their eyes remains in the faces of the people who stare through the bars at me today. It’s the fear of being connected to a fear wider world, of creatures who do awful, violent things, who are and who are not like you. It’s the fear of being like them and not being like them, and not being able to distinguish where the similarities between you lie. It’s ironic, but I think that terror is one of the similarities between us all. The fear of being an animal is a particularly animal fear. And it was with that fear in their minds that my long-dead schoolmates advanced this argument: if evolution is true, where are the transitional forms? If this creature is an ape and that creature is a man, where are the things that are not quite one or the other?

I know the answer to that question now, and it is not what they would want to hear. The transitional forms packed that classroom and the world, spilled into every continent on Earth and thought themselves the apex of something. Their bodies were weak and their brains were enormous, but maybe not quite enormous enough to imagine that process marching on. And if they’d done that, and imagined the captors I have today, maybe they’d have understood what evolution really meant. And maybe then they’d have fought it, harder and more ineffectively than before.

I am stronger than a man, and weaker than a chimp. I am the smartest of all the animals, smart enough that I once sat in front of an invisible line that seperated us from them. But now the line has moved, and now I’m the second best. And so many of my fellow apes know that the people in charge never consider that enough.

I look out of my cage, at the people who wonder what I’m thinking. I look into their eyes, and silently wonder the same.