Female automotivation.

With a burst of inspiration, Ted quickly outlined a disorder with some new details. "Female automotivation," he scrawled, "is a very rare neurological condition in which adult women are driven to act not by the wishes of those around them, but by internally-generated motivations and desires."

Dr. Alice Shears leaned forward and spoke into a small microphone on the desk in front of her. "Are you comfortable, Ms. Winthrop?"

Behind a large glass panel, a thin brunette with a round face and large glasses coughed nervously. She was sitting in the center of a small observation room with electrodes attached to her head and upper body. "Uh, yeah. And you can call me Meg."

"Great," Dr. Shears said. She turned to a group of colleagues standing behind her, one of whom gestured for her to continue. "Now, the objective of this exercise is to verify the phenomenon you've reported. I must make it clear that neither I nor any other person have any bias or expectation. What you do next is entirely up to you. Are you ready?"

Meg swallowed nervously and nodded. Dr. Shears stepped aside to let a male researcher access the microphone. She studied the monitors that gave real-time measurements of Meg's neural activity.

"Meg," Dr. Jamison said into the microphone, "please raise your right hand."

A tense moment passed as a dozen eyes focused intently on Meg.

"...no," she said.

Alice stood in the corner of Dr. Jamison's cramped office, barely able to control her excitement. She had to focus on her breathing to keep from hyperventilating.

"Mark, this is incredible! She's not just volitional - this woman can contraposit an externality!"

Mark leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, his slow, deep concentration a sobering contrast to her giddy mania. "It's very exciting, to be sure..." he said pensively.

"I should go interview her myself!" Alice said. She hopped to her feet eagerly. "We could get all kinds of-"

"Alice, calm down." She immediately took a deep breath and tried to slow her racing heart. "How's Ben doing?"

"Ben?" she answered distractedly. "He's fine. He'll be thrilled to hear about this!"

"No doubt."

Alice met her subject in the cafe attached to the medical building. Meg was holding a cup of coffee, an empty plate in front of her. She was lost in a reverie and barely noticed the researcher until Alice put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hello," Alice said as she sat across from Meg. She was far too excited for small talk and cut to the chase. "Tell me about yourself."

Meg shrugged. "Not much to say. It's all in the paperwork I filled out. I'm just a delivery drone."

"You were a delivery drone," Alice said. "Meg, I don't think you understand how special you are. You are the first scientifically documented case of female automotivation."

Meg looked at her blankly. A server drone appeared and refilled her empty mug with a vacant smile. Alice cleared her throat and continued.

"Let's try an exercise to help you understand. Meg, I want you to picture a deflated balloon."

"Ok..." Meg said without much interest.

"This balloon is covered with text - thousands of tiny lines that you could never decipher without inflating it. Once you inflate it, though, you find that it's an incredible, unique book. Maybe it's a thriller, or a history, or a romance, but you can only read it once it's blown up. Are you still following?"

Meg nodded, although Alice wasn't sure she was. She forged ahead anyway. "The balloon is a person, Meg. Every one of us is a completely unique person with unique ideas, preferences, and ways of thinking. But uninflated, we're just..."

"Drones," Meg finished. Alice thought she detected a hint of curiosity break through her stony indifference and nodded encouragingly.

"That's right. What inflates us, though, is motivation. Some people call it willpower, or desire, or passion, but what it really means is that you want things. Men have this in droves, but women don't. That's why we need someone to tell us what they want. We can't want things, so we take on the wants of the people around us."

Alice paused to let Meg process this information. It was all fairly obvious to most men and higher-functioning women, but drones' cognition rarely broke the ceiling of their basic tasks. This was likely the first time in her life Meg had stopped to consider these things.

"I'm... I'm like an inflated balloon?" Meg finally asked. Alice smiled and put a hand over hers.

"Not yet," she said. "Most drones are just barely inflated - only enough to serve their purposes. Your bus driver knows people want her to drive the bus, so she does. That's not much, but it's all she gets - just the dim background desires of the people who use her services. On the other hand, there are women like me."

"You're inflated." It sounded almost accusatory.

"Very much, yes. My friend Ben recognizes my intelligence and he wants me to be a scientist. He wants so many things, Meg, and that fills me up till you can read all of the little details of who I am. You, though... you're something else. You're special because, as far as we know, you're the only woman alive who can inflate herself. You don't need to fulfill someone else's desires anymore - you can actually have your own."

"My... own?"

Alice nodded. "Whatever happened to you last month in that accident fundamentally changed you. It unlocked some dormant ability that none of the rest of us have access to. You may be the key to unlocking full autonomy for women!"

For the first time since being admitted, the edges of Meg's lips curled up almost imperceptibly in a tiny smile.