In 2023 a travelling Circus Company resurrected itself after an absence of six years.

During those dormant years the Company had been reconstituted into being the world’s largest Circus free of animal acts. It was, probably, also the world’s first commercial Circus ever to be free of animal acts.

Otherwise, it featured all the traditional Circus acts such as, acrobats; aerial trapeze; clowns; fire breathers; juggling; marching bands with spectacular baton twirlings by the drum majors;  stunts of bicycle and motorbike and horseback riding; tightrope walking, human cannonball.

Gone forever were stunts involving dogs, elephants, komodo dragons lions, monkeys, python snakes, tigers.

One animal act that was discontinued after only one performance was of a wildcat hunting a rabbit. The advertisement said the act was real insofar as the wildcat would be allowed to “keep” the rabbit if it caught it. In that only performance, the rabbit had escaped after a three-minute chase in a “wildlife” enclosure.

Except for twelve Gorillas, all the animals had been placed in zoos in other countries.

Long before those six years of re-planning, robotics in the workplace all over the world had made phenomenal progress. And so by the time performing circus animals had become obsolete, the option of introducing robotic performing animals in the circus occurred as just another normal option to consider. In those six years of re-planning and restructuring, engineers in a laboratory in one of the Circus Trailers had manufactured a robot Gorilla they assessed as only a few percentage points less than biologically perfect.

At the beginning of their invention of their robot animal, the scientist engineers had incorporated gender in their design. Along the way, they had experimented with making their invention either female or male. At the end, both were rejected. Their final perfected robot was genderless.

So confidant in their machine were the owners of the Circus that they decided to give the paying public the final word.

Incorporated into the first performance after those six years there would be a Gorilla contest.

The robotic Gorilla would be included among the twelve biologicals in the last ever animal act in a circus. Every paying member of the audience who guessed correctly which of the thirteen performing Gorillas was the robot, would have their ticket price refunded, doubled.

The twelve real Gorillas were named, Arthur, Daphne, Emilia, Nathan, Rachel, Robert, Roland, Samuel, Thanga, Thomas, Victor, Violet. The robot Gorilla was named Spotty. Each name did not necessarily indicate the Gorilla’s gender.

None of the Gorillas would have specific acts to perform; each would participate peripherally in any of the human acts; all thirteen would be visible by the spectators in the performance areas throughout the evening engagement. All would be electronically tagged to be tracked by four engineers in the laboratory Trailer.

Only the four engineers in that Circus Trailer who would be keeping track on computer screens of all thirteen Gorillas, would know Spotty was the only robot animal.

Everyone directly involved in the planning and construction of Spotty was especially pleased that none of the other twelve Gorillas showed signs they were aware Spotty was a machine; so perfect was their invention.

The contest was a hit. It was published in every major newspaper in the country. The Circus night was sold out. One reason for this certainly was because the many requests from Agencies across the country for a non-circus private preview showing of the all-mechanical Gorilla had been denied, with the promise of the opportunity after that first-and-only Circus performance of the thirteen Gorillas.

For approximately the first hour of the evening there were continuous and loud and virtually countless sounds of joy among the seated viewers. Not so in that laboratory trailer, because all four engineers seated at their computers, their eyes fixed on their computer screens, had lost track of Spotty!

All electrical plugs in the Trailer were hastily checked, and re-checked. It was decided two of the engineers would leave the Trailer to count the Gorillas in performance. The four believed that the problem was only that Spotty’s electronics were suffering a minor temporary interference; probably an overload because of electronic personal devices brought by the hundreds of spectators. After all, Spotty was the only Gorilla who was entirely electronic from head to feet, and in every fiber of its synthetic-material Gorilla costume.

It did not occur to any of the four engineers that because the tracking devices on the Gorillas had a range limited to the performance spaces within the Circus tent, that Spotty had moved beyond the tent. Indeed, that precisely is what had happened!

In many countries the world over, there was a race among scientist-engineers to build robot machines capable of movements directed by sentience as nearly human as possible. In fictive plots in countless Movies that goal had been surpassed many years previously.

The much published Circus contest of Gorillas had stirred up rival criminal intent in an offshore Business Company deeply engaged in inventing sentient robotic algorithms long, long before that reconstituted Circus came into being.

A secret agent had been sent with battery-powered electronic devices to detect and lure the Circus electronic Gorilla.

The secret agent’s devices worked. Spotty had walked off the Circus premise limits towards the agent.

That agent had to cross a shallow river to get to the Circus. It was integral to that brilliant crime that the agent was dressed in a gorilla costume. However, the over-zealous agent activated her search electronics before she entered the shallow river. Hence, it was unavoidable that when she was crossing that shallow river, her wet gorilla hands would wet the electronic-mechanical devices she was operating to locate a machine robot Circus gorilla. Her dampened devices functioned erratically.

She chose to discard her wet gorilla costume in order to more easily access parts of her mechanical devices. She put the costume on the wild grass on the ground next to her where she sat. Because she was paying full attention to fixing her mechanical devices, she did not hear Spotty approaching from the rear.

Spotty stopped a few steps away from the agent because the magnetic signals from her devices that had lured Spotty to her, had weakened continuously until they ceased completely when Spotty was a few steps behind the agent.

It took Spotty’s highly sophisticated electronic algorithms only seconds to accurately calibrate the situation when it scanned the lump on the ground alongside the agent to be a gorilla costume, and to be reeking of the agent’s frustrated steaming perspiration.

It will, most probably, never be known if Spotty’s decision to not return to the Circus was deliberate. What is known is that Spotty and that agent and that agent’s gorilla costume were never seen nor heard about again.