The Disappearing Mass

Crivsola had been in prison for three weeks. The food was terrible — a grey porridge served twice daily, supplemented by stale bread and the occasional lump of something that might once have been a vegetable. But it was food, and she ate it.

One morning, while dressing, she noticed something odd. Her clothes fit the same as the day she arrived.

The Observation

This should not have been the case. According to her current model, food passed through a one-way valve and collected in a sac somewhere inside the body. She had been eating twice a day for twenty-one days. That was forty-two meals. The sac should have been filling up, and she should have been getting heavier — visibly heavier.

She was not.

Lomytguya, who had been imprisoned for nearly four months, confirmed the same thing. "I weigh about what I did when I arrived," she said, looking down at herself. "Maybe a little less, given the quality of the porridge."

The Prediction That Failed

Crivsola sat on her cot and thought carefully. The sac model made a clear prediction: if food collects in a pouch inside the body, then a person who eats every day should get heavier and heavier, without limit. Over months and years, you should swell like a wineskin being filled.

Nobody did. People ate enormous quantities of food over their lifetimes and stayed roughly the same size. Her own father — a man of considerable appetite — had eaten tens of thousands of meals and never once inflated beyond his usual bulk.

The prediction was wrong. Which meant the model was wrong.

What This Means

"So the sac does not simply collect food," Crivsola said aloud.

"Evidently not," said Lomytguya, who had been following the logic with the quiet attention of someone accustomed to spotting flawed arguments — a skill honed during years of union negotiations.

The food was going somewhere. It was entering the body and then — what? Either it was being changed into something else, or it was being pushed out. Or both.

The New Question

Crivsola revised her picture. Food entered the mouth. It passed through a one-way valve. It arrived somewhere inside the body. And then — crucially — it did not simply sit there. Something happened to it.

The food must be transformed, expelled, or both.

This was not yet a model. It was the shape of a hole where a model needed to be. But it told her where to look next. She needed to figure out what happened to food after it entered the body. And the best way to start was to ask what, if anything, came back out.

She turned to Lomytguya. "Let us make a list," she said, "of everything that leaves the human body."

Lomytguya raised an eyebrow. "This is going to be an unpleasant conversation."