Jayne sure loved her monkey friend Sergeant Jangles. He wasn’t friends with just anyone, as he so often told her. He couldn’t afford to be, not with his position. He oversaw a regimen of Simian Soldiers, all raised like him to be different from the average monkey. In many ways they were different from the average human as well.

You see, they were educated from birth to be self-sufficient and quite capable. They were given training on how to cook, how to drive specially designed cars, and how to communicate using sign language. Some were assigned to assist humans with disabilities, while others were assigned as soldiers. They were all quite intelligent, insightful, and wise, capable of making independent decisions.

And yet they weren’t citizens. Unable to vote, to marry, to own property, they were beneath the law, an invisible slave workforce. Their owners thought nothing of it. Why would they? They collected all their salary without having to provide any more than food and lodging, both of which were minimal for their charges. When pressed by members of the Monkey Liberation League (whose motto was “Monkeys are People too!”) they would bring up the expense of training and clothing, saying that the fees had yet to be recouped. When pressed further, they hemmed and hawed about exactly when that date would be reached. They’d say things like “Well you see, new uniforms have to be custom-made, and that don’t come cheap. They tear up their clothes so often, you see. And then there’s the hats. You can’t imagine how expensive they are, and they lose them all the time. Just when the debt is about paid up, there they go needing something else again. Why, they should be grateful we take care of them at all, as much bother as they are.”

Meanwhile, their owners never worked and lived in the better parts of town and ate at the better restaurants. You could always count on finding at least a dozen of them in the fancy hip coffee houses downtown during the day while their charges worked.

Jayne wasn’t a member of the League – she was much too young. She had not even heard about it and most likely never would. Her people didn’t waste time on such shenanigans as liberating others. They barely had time to look after their own selves – and when they had a spare moment to think about the plight of the less fortunate, generally thought it was the for the best for them to take up their own fight. It wouldn’t be right to do somebody else’s work for them, now would it? Nobody marched or rallied for them and they were just fine with that.

Jayne first met Jangles when he was a private in the Simian Army Corps, back when he was first starting out. Many monkeys made it up to sergeant, but never any further. It wasn’t for lack of ability. They had that in spades. It was the simple fact that if they became Lieutenants they’d expect to become Colonels, and that was unthinkable. Then it would be even more obvious that they were capable of being full citizens, and that wouldn’t do. So they were kept low to avoid the question even arising.

Not like Jangles ever worried about such things. He was content to do his work as long as he had to. He didn’t count down the days until he could retire. He didn’t look up his pension amount every few months, when things got stressful. He got used to not being listened to, not having any real authority. Sure, his superiors told him that his happiness mattered, but when it came down to providing concrete solutions towards creating said happiness, they were silent. And any suggestion he offered was immediately discounted as being unfeasible. They were all talk and no action, blaming their employee’s dissatisfaction with the unequal work/life balance on the employees and never on themselves. They had fulfilled their required duties by having the “happiness talk” and left it at that. Once Jangles realized this was his reality, he accepted it. It was the monkey way – that which cannot be changed must be accepted.

One thing that was changed was his name. Of course his true name wasn’t Jangles. That was randomly assigned to him by his “caretaker”. Owner, manager, boss, slave master, however you wanted to think about it – it was all the same. Some titles sounded better than others, but they all described the same person. “Caretaker” was probably the most deceptive and sugar-coated, or to put it honestly, the most untrue. They didn’t take care of the monkeys at all. They cared for them just enough to keep them working, not out of any concern for the monkeys well-being, but for their own wallets.

The “caretakers” didn’t bother to ask the monkeys what their names were. They didn’t even consider the question. To them the monkeys were dumb animals, barely more intelligent than the family dog. Dogs got demeaning names like Spot or Scout or Snowball, so why shouldn’t monkeys? In the same vein, the monkeys were taught a sort of sign language so they could answer their keeper’s questions but it was never used to ask them anything. That would be absurd.

Jayne had learned the sign, same as everyone else in the town. They all had to, so they could give orders to the monkeys. But she, being a child, and a female one at that, instinctually understood the position of the monkey workers. She understood the dynamic of lesser-than, of powerless. She understood what it was like to be talked at and never with. Thankfully she didn’t follow the usual course of passing on the oppression. Lesser-thans usually treated their perceived inferiors the same as how they had been treated, handing down abuse the same way poor families handed down clothes. Thankfully, Jayne knew better, and acted better. So she asked Jangles what his real name was when they first met. This was done privately of course, and the name was kept secret. She never spoke it aloud or used his unique hand-sign within the presence of an adult. It was critical that she kept up the illusion of hierarchy, or else their friendship would have been terminated.