Brendon Fisher’s Residence
City of Starlight
Xanadu Quadrant

He watched her through closed eyes as she glided across his sleeping room with her arms spread wide, wearing only a smile—prelude to her passionate embrace. She was tall, with curly, golden hair with incredible blue eyes and legs that seemed to go on forever. Her breasts were wondrous and cried out for his very personal attention. Her waist had barely enough room on it for her bellybutton and even that, her bellybutton, was flawless. And her face—oh, her face!—her face would make an angel weep. But the best thing about her was that she was all his, willing and eager to please him any way he wished, whenever he wished and as often as he wished. For the third time that morning, his body anticipated her caress and reacted. Brendon Fisher sat on the edge of his unmade bed and waited for the sensuous touch of the perfectly manicured fingers his mind was convinced were real.
His small, nondescript house on the outskirts of Starlight, the capital city of the planet Enya, located at the junction of the stately Brandywine River and the ultramarine-blue Impact Harbor, was just another cookie-cutter dwelling. There were many of these dwellings scattered throughout the city. Mixed in among these simple houses were more ornate homes and multi-story buildings that stretched toward the planet’s cerulean sky. It had only been seven Enyan years since July 20, 2238 C.E.—January 1, 0001 on Enya—the day humans landed on the third planet orbiting the star Intipa Awachan and claimed it for their own.
 
Tendrils of white smoke curled lazily in the air around Brendon’s head, courtesy of the smoldering hallucinogenic. He inhaled the pungent fumes deeply. A moss-like ground cover found only in Sherwood Forest filled the bottom of an unadorned bowl. Brendon and his two friends had easily filled their backpacks and pockets with the non-flowering bryophyte and returned to Starlight, separating their treasure into small portions and selling to others what little they deemed in excess to their own needs. This was not Brendon’s first experience with the fantasies spiraling into the air from the bowl, but like a rapidly growing number of others (both male and female) it was far from his last.
 
Tendrils of white smoke curled lazily in the air around Brendon’s head, courtesy of the smoldering hallucinogenic. He inhaled the pungent fumes deeply. A moss-like ground cover found only in Sherwood Forest filled the bottom of an unadorned bowl. Brendon and his two friends had easily filled their backpacks and pockets with the non-flowering bryophyte and returned to Starlight, separating their treasure into small portions and selling to others what little they deemed in excess to their own needs. This was not Brendon’s first experience with the fantasies spiraling into the air from the bowl, but like a rapidly growing number of others (both male and female) it was far from his last.
 
In a single sentence buried in the account of her 4,000-kilometer trek out of the forest and back to civilization she entitled There and Back Again (a tribute to J. R. R. Tolkein of Earth’s twentieth century), she mentioned that the vegetation she added to one of her prepared survival meals was a hallucinogenic. However, her journal entry failed to reveal the severity of its erotic effects or its intensely addictive nature. There were several ways to ingest the green groundcover: burned and the fumes inhaled, injected into a blood vessel or made into a cocktail using some liquid. The only difference between the methods was how quickly the hallucinations overwhelmed the individual.
 
Jason Behan, a member of the Second Flight, avidly read and re-read There and Back Again and took the next logical step: he began to experiment with the drug he named Xanadu Dreams. Not only did he supply his friends with it but also included detailed instructions on how to make it even more potent (for appropriate compensation, of course). Jason Behan was also the first to die from a XDOD (Xanadu Dream Overdose).
 
Jason Behan, a member of the Second Flight, avidly read and re-read There and Back Again and took the next logical step: he began to experiment with the drug he named Xanadu Dreams. Not only did he supply his friends with it but also included detailed instructions on how to make it even more potent (for appropriate compensation, of course). Jason Behan was also the first to die from a XDOD (Xanadu Dream Overdose).
 
Brendon took several more deep breaths and allowed the world created by the vapors to consume him once again. Like other addicts, he would ignore hygiene, thirst and even hunger in favor of the intense eroticism the vapors created. When he temporarily escaped its spell, he admitted the girl was only an illusion, that she did not really exist, that he really could not feel the heat of her hard nipples against his lips, but the experience seemed so real that he no longer cared. Like the other addicts, the times he managed to escape from Xanadu Dreams became fewer and further apart as the days passed.
 
Strangely enough, few survivors of The Sickness succumbed to Xanadu Dreams; in curious contrast, those who came to Enya on the Second Flight were extremely susceptible. Once enraptured by Xanadu Dreams, an addict became little more than a zombie, unable and unwilling to contribute to the fledgling colony or to interact with others. Building the new world was a never-ending journey perched on the razor edge of disaster and the addiction left the ever-growing cadre of addicts little energy to spare. As more and more people became hostages to the drug’s effects, the colony began to unravel.
 
The girl’s red lips parted as she put her hands on his shoulders and leaned forward. Brendon whimpered as her tongue touched his.