The Origin of Fear

Why is it that humans are so full of anxiety? We are the top of the food chain, the dominant species, yet we get worked up about seemingly insignificant things. It is quite ridiculous. We should feel safe & secure in modern society, so why is that deep down, most people struggle with irrational fears? These are questions Leona is exploring for her university thesis. She suffers from Phobophobia, which is an actual fear of phobias. Rather than hide away from the world, Leona is studying fear in the hopes that it will help her to understand her phobia and find ways to cope with it. Her experiments have led to a remarkable theory. She has discovered a way to strip away extraneous distractions, remove false positives and discount the obvious. In each instance, this technique leads the subject to the conclusion that their anxiety is caused by a person; a seemingly normal person who for some reason is triggering our fight or flight instincts. Leona believes that deep down, our instincts are warning us about certain people, our DNA is telling us that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Leona believes she has discovered a subconscious mechanism for detecting people with sociopathic, maybe even psychopathic tenancies. However, after she meets her latest test subject, a fellow student called Imogen at a coffee bar, she discovers that she's actually stumbled across something far more ancient and horrific. She's about to learn what the true origin of fear really is.