Dorothy sat down at her desk at work and tore open the wrapper of the candy bar, disregarding the nutritional information, and bit. It was just as the news reports claimed: an honest-to-goodness chocolate bar, with caramel and a little crispy bits and a cookie center that crunched like a pretzel. The Century bar wasn’t outstanding: there was a reason why it was leftover in the office Halloween candy bin, after the Snickers and Butterfingers were gone. But the appeal of negative calories was astounding. The Century had a nutritional count of -100 calories. Dorothy did not care how it happened – transfat eliminations or carb-friendly ingredients, or maybe magic fairy dust. If she had cared, she would have realized that the wrapper indicated only one bar was to be ingested in a 24-hour period. Dorothy ate three, on an empty stomach. The catalysts baked inside the cookie were mashed up in her mouth, and traveled down to a hydrochloric bath in the stomach, where they began to foam. The catalysts, like all catalysts, were tireless engines of chemical change, and on a restricting diet they harmlessly worked their alchemy on the fats and starches in the digesting food. But Dorothy didn’t have any other food in her gut, so the catalysts began working through her stomach lining, and then her intestinal wall. Within an hour Dorothy was holding her belly in the ladies room at work. Normally the catalysts would be on their way to a speedy exit via the GI tract’s highway. But there was too much congestion for the catalysts, and they were taking a longcut downward through her torso’s other organs. And with all roads, they would eventually find their way out. But Dorothy would not be around to appreciate their steadfastness.

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