What Comes Out

Lomytguya turned out to be an excellent cataloguer of bodily outputs. Factory work, she explained, made you intimately familiar with what the human body produced — especially during twelve-hour shifts with inadequate facilities.

The Inventory

Together, they assembled a list of everything that left the body:

Solid waste, from the bottom. Liquid waste, also from below but a different exit. Sweat, from the skin. Breath, from the mouth and nose. Occasionally blood, from cuts or injuries. And, under the influence of Nsujala, food back out the mouth — but they already understood that as a malfunction of the valve.

Crivsola stared at the list scratched into the cell wall.

The most important item was solid waste. It came out regularly — roughly once a day — and it came out from the opposite end of the body to where food went in.

The Tube

"Food goes in the top," Crivsola said slowly. "Something comes out the bottom. What if the body is not a sac at all, but a passage — a long tube running from the mouth to the other end?"

Lomytguya considered this. "Like a pipe."

"Like a pipe. Food enters one end, travels through, and whatever is left exits the other."

This was a fundamentally different picture from either of her original models. The hollow body had food falling into a vast empty space. The sac had food collecting in a pouch. But the tube model had food moving through a continuous passage — in at the top, out at the bottom.

Input and Output

This model had an immediate advantage. It explained the disappearing mass. Food did not pile up inside the body forever because it was passing through. What went in the top eventually came out the bottom.

But Crivsola noticed a problem almost immediately.

What goes in does not match what comes out.

She put bread in her mouth. What came out the other end, hours or days later, was emphatically not bread. It did not look like bread, smell like bread, or — she was confident — taste like bread, though she had no intention of confirming this.

The Simple Tube — and Its Flaw

The simplest version of the tube model said that food passes straight through unchanged — the body as a hollow pipe, nothing more. But the evidence was against this. Bread went in and something entirely different came out.

Something inside the tube must be changing the food.

The tube was not a passive pipe. It was a pipe that did something to the food as it passed through. What it did, Crivsola did not yet know. But the fact that the output differed so dramatically from the input meant that the body was not merely a passage. It was a passage that transformed.

She needed to figure out the nature of that transformation. And for that, she would need to think more carefully about what "changing" food actually meant.