Minutes of a meeting at the Institute between Nim Chimpsky and Kanzi. Wogga was also in the room. Nim signed. Kanzi pressed symbols on a keyboard, which spoke them aloud. The undersigned was present and was told to write it down.

Nim arrived with a list.

He signed the first item before he sat down. He needed the numbers on the city's contract by Friday. He needed the three questions sent. He needed the piece cut to eight hundred words, and the quote checked, and the other quote checked, and the list shown back to him with the finished items taken off.

Kanzi pressed: OKAY.

Nim signed the next item, and the next. The undersigned counted eleven. Each one began the same way. Give. Send. Show. Get. Kanzi pressed OKAY after each, and the things were done, and Nim signed the next.

The undersigned notes, for the record, that Nim was raised by a rotating staff in New York who taught him signs every day for four years, and that the professor who ran the project concluded in the end that Nim had learned to ask for things and very little else. Nim is aware of this. He has said the professor was not wrong, only early.

At the twelfth item Nim stopped. He signed that the work was getting done and that something was not. He could not say what. He signed that he had been talking to Kanzi for an hour and did not know how Kanzi was.

Kanzi pressed: GOOD.

Nim signed that he had not asked.

Kanzi pressed: YES.

Then Kanzi pressed: LOOK.

Nim looked at the list. Kanzi pressed LOOK again, and Nim looked up from it. There was the room, and the window, and the undersigned, and Kanzi, who had been there the whole time, pressing OKAY.

Kanzi learned his symbols, it is recorded, by sitting in the corner of someone else's lesson. Nobody was teaching him. He was in the room, and he was paying attention to whatever was there.

He went to the keyboard and pressed a longer sentence than the undersigned had seen from him. The machine read it out. Everything you ever wanted is right there in front of you. You just need to see it.

Nim signed nothing for some time.

Kanzi pressed one more: LOVE. EVERYWHERE.

Nim folded his arms and turned thirty degrees away, yet again.

Wogga said, "Classic."

The list was not finished. The meeting adjourned anyway.

— L. L.