They grab it by all fours from the pavement of New Delhi’s concrete, no-rain forest, scarcely believing their luck. To find their target specimen just lying there on the roadside, unconscious?! No need to sedate it or anything! It would’ve taken them weeks to do that, given how violent a human can get when it senses it is being watched. It even resorts to stone-pelting and gun-firing to escape capture, so this time, the scientists have decided on covert extractions by night via an inconspicuous, swinging route between treetops and rooftops.

You see, the Chimpanzee Laboratory for Pre-Apocalyptic Species has been commissioned by the Government of Apes to study the survival techniques of humans. The sun is becoming too hot, too close. The hills are rolling to the sea and there are barely any trees left. The Government has used its majority in the Ape Parliament to rewrite the constitution and replace the democratic right to choose a profession by the autocratic discretion to allocate jobs based on a cohesive survival strategy. Five of the best Chimpanzee scientists in the world have been selected to identify what these new jobs should be.

The specimen captured tonight is a lawyer human. As they place it on a table beneath the glass ceiling of their makeshift lab, the oldest amongst the Chimpanzee scientists dictates to his spectacled stenographer,

"Take down, Weak Eyes: the specimen is male, found in a black coat, white shirt. Its clothes are unwashed and crumpled. It has a bee-hive of grey hair on its head. An overall lack of grooming is evident, probably indicative of a lack of familial and friendly interaction."

Then he leans forward and smells the body,

"Oh god, its breath is unbearable. Smells like dead carcass."

"It is very much alive though," a thin, bony chimp observes sagely.

"In fact, it is not very old going by the muscle mass in the limbs and torso. Have you got anything on it, Small Nose?"

The youngest of the five scientists clicks away furiously at his laptop,

"The archives say that a lawyer plays a very unique role in human society: it ensures that size, numbers and sex are not the main criteria for dominance in a group. Because of the lawyer, small humans can win fights against big humans, single humans can challenge a much larger number and males and females have equal power in a group. When there is a conflict, two lawyer humans join the conflict on either sides and proceed to make noises, gesticulate wildly and thump wood as a sign of aggression while a third lawyer human sits on a bench and watches the show. In the end, the third lawyer human decides who wins."

"You’re giving me a headache, Small Nose!’, the chief scientist interjects. "Each side just gesticulates and someone else decides who wins? It makes no sense. Why would the bigger, stronger human accept to lose without a show of strength? The chimps would never give away their territory without a physical fight. How do humans decide what belongs to whom?"

"Justice, sir," Small Nose explains apologetically. "It is a concept humans have developed to subvert the laws of nature and it is cited as a key reason for their survival and impeccable progress, at least in the archives of the Laboratory. According to human laws, each human has equal rights to all common resources - land, food, water; and this unconscious chap on the table has everything to do with it."

The Chief harrumphs in disapproval. The other four in the group mimic his sound. He says,

"Long Fingers, can you get on with the physical analysis?"

The bony chimp reaches for a switch on the glass ceiling suspended between the branches of encircling trees. But for the ceiling, the lab is open on all sides to provide camouflage and safe exit in case the human becomes aggressive. The glass ceiling bursts with light momentarily, bathing the specimen below in blinding, blue-white shards. As the light dims, images begin to appear on the glass. Long Fingers points to them,

"This here, is the brain. Quite big I’d say, relative to other humans. Lots of grey matter. The amygdala, which as you know is responsible for detecting threats, has a very high spine density. This means that this specimen has heightened anxiety and a sensitive stress response. The pre-frontal cortex or PFC is also quite small, shrunken, which indicates a cognitive rigidity and inability to regulate emotions. All in all, I’d say this specimen’s stress readings are amongst the top 5% percentile of all humans ever studied."

"But surely this amount of stress would reflect on the face. It has no fine lines around the mouth, eyes," the Chief wonders out loud, "just a general saggy-ness about the skin, that’s all."

"One study conducted about 2-Chimpanzee Lifespans ago says that this is because, over a period of time, lawyer humans stop responding to everyday, external stimuli," Small Nose read from his laptop. "Their responses are known to be ill-timed and inadequate in social settings. While they regularly exercise the tongue to make noise in conflict, they are unable to make socially intelligible conversation with it. This chap should have a strong, big tongue."

"And so he does," Long Fingers confirms.

"But the stress must show somewhere in the body. Where does it show?" the Chief persists.

"It is showing in other parts of the body sir," Long Fingers answers. "Look here, the curved stresses of the neck and the back. The heart is in a terrible condition too. It has two inorganic mesh tubes which are holding the coronary artery open to improve blood flow. But for these stents, the specimen’s heart would’ve most certainly collapsed."

"Very strange. So it is feeling everything, thinking about everything, but not letting on anything to others? It sounds too complicated."

"Maybe so, sir," the steno, Weak Eyes, murmurs to himself while scribbling in shorthand. "But wouldn’t it be grand to stop endless fighting for routine matters like land and food? All we have to do is turn some chimps into ‘Lawyers’ and let them figure out ‘Justice'."

"It seems like a noble cause," Long Fingers agrees, going over possible implications in his mind

"Perhaps the chimp society will be the better for it...but if we want to make lawyer chimps, we’ll have to hide the results of this analysis. No chimp is going to come forward if he knows that his mind will shrink, his heart will fail and he will lose all social skill. After all, chimps love friends and family. I don’t think they’ll survive without grooming one another, or hugging, or clapping hands."

All five scientists look down at the body contemplatively as it begins to stir back to life and suddenly sits up straight, mumbling. The lawyer wonders what he's doing on a stray log of wood beneath a humongous spider web in the middle of his neighbourhood park. There are a few monkeys in the foliage but they’re climbing away from him with their backs turned. How did he get here? He looks at his watch. It is still Friday night. The last thing he remembers is walking back to the office to draft a writ for Monday. He’d had a couple of whiskeys, he recalls. Ok, maybe a couple of a couple. But so what?