rivers of reward without earning reward

Marathe's distillation of what the pleasure-lever actually costs, and the theme's moral core beneath the neurology. The phrase "rivers of reward without earning reward" names the exact corruption addiction performs: it severs pleasure from the effort, risk, or meaning that pleasure evolved to reward, delivering the payoff while dissolving the person who should have earned it. The endpoint — "giving away their souls and lives for p-terminal stimulation" — is the substance-cage stated as a soul-transaction, and it doubles as the theme's indictment of every character trading a life for a high. The lever just makes visible what the Substance does slowly: reward for nothing, until there is nothing left to reward.