Victoria Rosewood stretched out on the common room couch. She was finding it incredibly hard to be motivated enough to do any schoolwork, and found that admiring the changing leaves through large windows was a far better use of her time. She was hardly alone; in fact, there was a small crowd by the corner that was excitedly chatting, huddled around a laptop, books strewn about the floor, coldly abandoned.

They were calling it various things, as excited young people with something new and illicit are wont to do, though the technical name was Binaural Beat. It spread faster than a trend had any right to, but its versatility made it an instant hit with a large subsection of the student body. It was, in the simplest terms, a series of files that used various sound frequencies to induce hallucinations and euphoria. Depending on the particular track, the effects rarely lasted in any obvious way, and it was of course completely undetectable physically. For those who shied away from hallucinogens normally, it was a perfectly healthy alternative.

The files had been distributed on S-Net, a computer network open to the Farraday Academy students. It was designed to share and store schoolwork, but as the first vanguard of the silicon elite began to evolve, it became a secure place for students to share all manner of other things. There were a myriad of folders that lay beneath a labyrinth of other folders that the average student could navigate blind, but which a teacher would never think to find. It saw a particular boom as music piracy destroyed the compact disc, and it was in this spirit that these particular sound files began to circulate.

Today, a new one had been added, and the common room was abuzz with people downloading it, and discussing their experiences with the others. Victoria had never tried it, not out of any particular desire not to. Rather, she had little patience for a sound file that wasn’t music. She felt that the euphoria so often attributed to the Binaural Beats most likely paled in comparison to the feeling she got from her usual listening. A girl walked over and leaned on the couch, looking down onto Victoria’s face.

“Hey girl, we’re gonna go to Jane’s room and all do a little theta waving. You wanna come?”
Victoria looked up lazily, and smiled. “Thanks Lanie, but I think I’m gonna hang out here. Maybe go take a walk or something.”
“Wow, living on the Edge, are we?” Lanie Peterson responded, chuckling as she sauntered off to join the group. Victoria crossed her legs, closed her eyes, and put on a trip-hop mix to nap to.

Later that night, she walked into the dining hall, an impeccably balanced meal courtesy of the Academy’s meticulous dining staff sitting on a tray in her hands. She surveyed the tables carefully; she was a mealtime drifter, rarely seen sitting at the same table two days in a row. As it happened, she was eating rather later than she usually did, and she found a room much sparser than usual. Seeing no one she particularly wished to sit with, she placed her tray on a vacant table before seeing someone in the corner of the room, out of her peripheral vision.

Marcus Ellenbee was eating a bowl of soup with the urgency of someone who had been told that they would die immediately upon finishing their next bowl of soup. There was a book open in front of him, but it was going woefully untouched. Likewise, he did not seem to notice the approaching Victoria, and it was not until she circled the table and bent down to see from his vantage point that she spoke.

“Enjoying our dinner, are we?”
Marcus jumped, and went into a panic, attempting with absolutely no success to appear as if he were reading instead of staring longingly at Cherry Ashford, who was sitting across the room eating by herself. Victoria was laughing.
“Oh my god, dude, you were in a trance! You are Stage 3-ing real bad.”
“I wasn’t looking at- I was just reading and spaced out- what are you doing sneaking around anyway-…what is Stage 3?”
“Don’t you know, my young Marcus? You’ve got Cherryitis.”

Cherryitis is not recorded in any current medical text, but over the last two years it had been observed so frequently that for the girls of the Farraday Academy it was an immediately identifiable medical condition that afflicted nearly every boy and even several girls at the Academy at least once.

The disease known as Cherryitis had 6 Stages:
1.) Awe. Upon seeing Cherry Ashford for the first time, it was almost impossible to avoid being taken back with her nearly otherworldly beauty. It was characterized by hanging jaws and wide eyes.

2.)Infatuation. Once the initial awe subsided, the infected would gaze at her from afar, wondering if they might possibly have a chance with her. It was characterized by frequent signing.

At this point, most would lose all hope and give up or move on to someone that actually ever showed interest in dating. For those who did not, however:

3.)Obsession. This was the state of continuing to pursue the far-off hope that some sort of relationship with Cherry Ashford would be even remotely possible. Symptoms included being pitied by everyone who knew what a poor fool one was.

“Stage 3? That’s ridiculous, I don’t have a disease, I was just spacing out and Cherry happened to be over where I was looking.”
“Marcus.”
“Besides, she’s not even…that…pretty…”
“Marcus.”
“Oh man she’s perfect and she will never even look at me for more than a second. I am pathetic, I am a sham of a man, I will be alone forever-”
“Marcus, you just got what everyone who ever looked at Cherry Ashford got. You can beat this thing, you can. You just have to make a choice: You can either pine for her forever until you die and crumble into dust, or you can admit that she is undateable and move on with your life.”

Marcus stared at Cherry for another couple of seconds before responding.

“I think…I think I want to pine forever.”
“Well, at least you’re stickin’ to your guns,” Victoria conceded, smiling as she sat across from him and obstructed his view. As much as it was her instinct to pity any of Cherry’s innumerable fans, Marcus was just so innocent and nice that she couldn’t help but forgive him.

—

Over in the West Campus, Kyle Moran knocked on Ian Westport’s door. He had not seen his best friend in days. Even before that, however, he had noticed that Ian was distant, seemingly going through the motions rather than actively engaged in anything. Kyle hesitated to call him addicted, but it seemed all he cared about was the Binaural file he’d shown him. Always that one file, over and over again. One of the ten least prudish people at the school, even he was beginning to worry. Something was not right.

On the other side of the door, Ian was in the middle of another session. Despite his initial reluctance, it had become a frequent habit. In fact, Ian now did it more than almost anyone else at the Academy. Most assumed he was just letting loose a little, but there was more to it.

Ian was chasing something. Partially it was a feeling, something wholly unique among the experiences his friends had related to him in using it. Something about it was different for him, and he wanted to know what. Part of it was a nagging in the back of his head, something that told him he had to keep doing it, to keep looking for something hidden deep in the frequencies that only he could find.

And then he was chasing a hand, coming down out of the infinite white. All he had to do was grasp it, to hold it in his, and he would finally understand…