When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught a young chimpanzee to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, a student at Schermerhorn's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant.  A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it.