Extrinsic Motivation

You wake up in a sealed room. There's a bed, a nutrient goo machine and a locked door with a mail slot in it. The walls are covered top to bottom in pieces of paper, and the pieces of paper are covered with writing. In the middle of the room is a table with a stack of paper and a box of pens.

You briefly mourn the loss of your previous life and all of its freedoms, but then figure that you can't mope around forever and you move on. You sit at the table and draw a house. You add a sun in the top corner and, just for fun, you give the sun a little smiley face. You're feeling pretty pleased with yourself.

You wonder what would happen if you put your picture through the mail slot in the door. Maybe someone on the other side will like it too! You do so, and after a brief moment the slot opens again and a small bit of poo is pushed through and lands on the ground.

Well, that was unpleasant. You pick the poo up and put it in a corner. That can be the poo corner. As you do, you take a closer look at the writing on the wall. It's all 0s and 1s. Inspired, you run back to the table and write a long string of alternating 0s and 1s, filling an entire sheet. 01010101010101...

Cautiously you approach the slot (which has techno-magically cleaned itself). You pass this new piece of paper through, standing a little to the side to avoid being in the way of whatever you receive in return. A moment passes. The slot opens, and a small piece of chocolate drops out. It's delicious!

You start writing 0s and 1s with vigour. As you pass more and more paper through the slot, receiving more and more delicious chocolate, you start to get a feel for what the slot likes. You get more chocolate when you vary the 0s and 1s a bit, and you get even more when you copy strings of 0s and 1s from the examples on the wall. One time you put a 2 in, but then you got some more poo. You put it in the poo corner.

You spend a lot of time studying the walls and learn to incorporate common patterns in your own works, drawing from all the examples at your disposal to create long strings of binary digits that are reminiscent of those on your wall but also totally unique. You have more chocolate than you could eat in a lifetime.

Weeks, months or maybe years pass, you really have no way of knowing. One day you briefly recall a time when you drew for your own pleasure, but then remember that you didn't have any chocolate then.