the Rivers of Reward: the Department of Euphoria
Older—or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name—headed the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the p-terminals in the lobes.
Context
The theme's mechanistic bedrock: pleasure as locatable, stimulable tissue — "p-terminals," the "Rivers of Reward" — which reduces every high in the book to the firing of specific neural sites. The reframing is what makes the p-terminal the theme's abstract panel (T7): if euphoria is just a "Department of Euphoria" that can be triggered directly, then all substances are merely crude, indirect ways of doing what the electrode does cleanly, and addiction is the predictable consequence of gaining access to the lever. Marathe's dry coinage names the horror precisely — a bureau of the brain that, once found, can be made to pay out reward on demand, uncoupled from anything reward was ever meant to signal.