Crossing Fifth Avenue today, a woman riding a bicycle was on a clear trajectory towards a collision with my person which would have resulted had we not mutually come to the decision that we should both change our respective velocities. Her decision occurred later than mine, owing mostly to the fact that turning onto the avenue on a bicycle carried with it far more concentration than my merely walking across the street.

In the milliseconds between my decision and her decision, I absolved to take the woman and her bike through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge (otherwise known as a wormhole), and shift her twenty feet south and east of her current position. She experienced no loss of time (consciously, at least), but the fright of this unexpected and inexplicable change caused the woman to lose control of the bike, banking left abruptly, and crashing into a parked Mini Cooper.

I continued on my way, but was quite disappointed with the result. Was this woman so blindly confident in her perception of four dimensions that she had never expected anything like this to happen? Are all humans like this? Or at least all the sober ones? I remember reading the theory that as humans began the evolution from “just another animal” to the intelligent species of today, the brain developed what is called “the millisecond delay.” Essentially, when faced with the “fight or flight” decision all living creatures will experience, humanity used a newly forged intellect to make a quick assessment of the situation that superseded pure instinct and resulted in things like fear, bravery, stupidity etc. It is because of this thoughtful pause that early man was able to take out larger, potentially deadly animals and is also why you are not as fast as your cat. I walked home through Madison Square Park, moving pigeons through the wormhole. They seemed to take it just fine, though my understanding (from watching the movie The Core) is that pigeons rely on Earth’s magnetic field in order to navigate. The squirrels got pissed, but they managed to escape any injuries and got over it
quickly.

Concluding, humans are stupid because they evolved to be that way, and if anyone ever tells you that “the microprocessor is the greatest invention of the Twentieth
Century,” you tell them to shut their damn mouth.

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