A simple concept

Everyone knows that humans are not intelligent. However, my colleagues and I believe that there is more to these little furry creatures than meets the eye. It should, of course, be noted that even the most intelligent human is undoubtedly less intelligent than even the least educated Proxima Centauri, but there is certainly evidence that suggests humans may exhibit intelligence on levels similar to the inhabitants of Castor and Polaris. To test our (admittedly fringe) theory, we took one of the apes and tried to “Centaurize” it – in other words, to teach it to become one of us.

Of course, the experiment was doomed to fail. We began by explaining to the human how quantum mechanics and relativity are reconciled, how we effortlessly created the universe and everything in it (including homo sapiens), and how something came from nothing in the process – incredibly simple concepts, really. Of course, the human parroted everything we told it, but there was some debate concerning whether the human actually understood what we were saying or whether it was a mere case of rote operant conditioning.

My colleagues and I ultimately decided on the latter. We had been naively optimistic. Our brains are light-years long, theirs are only the size of a football, and we should have known better.

We sent the human back to its home planet. We watched as the creature made a successful landing, and then we fixed our sights elsewhere.

The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.