After a brief introduction mentioning the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) and the mysterious disappearance of its financial backer, Morton, State of Fear begins with story of Jonathan, a graduate student and physics researcher in Paris. He meets a woman named Marisa while she is having an argument with her boyfriend Jimmy at a café. Jonathan takes Marisa and Jimmy to his laboratory for a demonstration of his research equipment, a wave simulator. Marisa is particularly interested in what Jonathan tells her about the great height of tsunamis, gleefully noting, “So a person cannot run away from this” (11). Sulking, Jimmy departs, and Jonathan accompanies Marisa to her apartment, where they have sex.

Shortly afterwards, three men break into Marisa’s apartment. They pin Jonathan down and place an unknown substance against his arm (later, it is revealed to be a deadly poisonous blue-ringed octopus). After Marisa shoots a gun, the men disperse, and she insists on not calling the police. Jonathan asks to go, but he begins to feel ill and has trouble speaking and walking. He becomes paralyzed, but Marisa seems unconcerned. She drops his body into the river, and he sinks below the surface. Back at the laboratory, the research equipment starts up and transmits some data to an unknown location in France before erasing its hard drives.