After years of speculation, transit officials quietly admitted Thursday that the mysterious stone sphincter in the Edge District is not art at all, but the entrance to a taxpayer-funded $2.4 billion hyperloop designed to whisk passengers between St. Petersburg and Tampa.

So far, the project has transported exactly three humans, all of them drunk, two shopping carts and a Ferg's chicken wing offered by a passerby as a sacrifice to the glowing hole.

“When Elon Musk announced his tube thing, we figured we could out-weird him,” said PSTA spokesperson Buster Lane, tapping a clipboard covered in budget overruns. “We built the portal, we plugged it in, and… well, it technically works. But ridership numbers are lower than the void of deep space.”

Locals say they’ve long suspected the structure was more than mere sculpture. “I’ve seen guys stumble out of Bodega at 2 a.m., lean against that thing, and suddenly whoosh — gone,” said neighborhood resident Angela Moore. “Sometimes they come back the next morning, sometimes they don’t. Either way, they smell worse than before.”

Astrophysicists, meanwhile, are furious that the experimental portal has altered the very chemistry of the cosmos. NASA released a statement Friday confirming that, due to immutable laws of quantum mechanics, sending just one hobo with a bottle of bottom-shelf vodka through the portal has permanently imbued the outer reaches of the universe with “the faint but unmistakable stench of a Greyhound bus station.”

“That’s forever now,” sighed NASA scientist Dr. Raj Patel. “We’re picking up whiffs of Thunderbird wine as far out as the Crab Nebula. Future civilizations will study the cosmos and wonder how creation itself threw up in its own mouth.”

Despite the setbacks, PSTA insists the hyperloop is a success. “Look, it’s not about how many people ride it, it’s about having visionary infrastructure,” Lane said. “Plus, the person who picked up the chicken wing when it exited in Tampa said it 'made their day'.”

When pressed about whether the portal could ever fulfill its original promise of a rapid Tampa–St. Pete connection, Lane was evasive. “Technically, yes, it gets you to Tampa in less than one second,” he said. “The issue is you arrive 7,000 years in the future, in a reality where Tampa is ruled by iguanas. Some people might call that a bug, but we see it as a feature.”

For now, the city has installed a modest sign beside the glowing stone circle: “PSTA HYPERLOOP — RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK (p.s. Please do not throw chicken wings into the void.)”

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