Prologue

Physicist Charles Cobb was not the person who would believe in ghost stories. Furthermore, he was the one who always found scientific explanations to all of the paranormal activities happening constantly in his town. He has been a huge inspiration for many young scientists, and the only human being able to make religion look like a new branch of science. However, his life didn't end exactly the way he used to imagine. He didn't get to become the revolutionist he has always urged to be. What's even more ironic, his death happened to be the source of some fresh conspiracy theories.

It happened on January 6th, during one of his researches in a house, commonly recognised as "haunted". Despite it's bizarre look, the building never seemed to attract anyone's attention. It has been abandoned by it's owners 30 years ago, but people simply chose to walk away from it, believing that it could hypnotize them, and make them go insane. In fact, they had a reason to believe so, as everyone who has ever entered that building, never left it mentally stable. Of course, this phenomenon was yet another occasion for Charles to prove his genius, so he gathered his scientific crew for a new research. The street was so empty that evening, they could hear the echo of their own breathing getting mixed with the sound of the chilling breeze, summoning unusually eerie atmosphere. They carefully uncovered the parts of a huge equipment, called the Quantum Supercomputer (QS), after parking their tiny yellow minivan in the backyard of the house, next to an arid thin tree. Charles decided that he has to be the one to locate all the cameras inside the building, so he entered it first, while everyone else was turning on the QS. He was inside for only three seconds, when the crew noticed the QS glitching and making loud noises, which was very unusual for such a powerful equipment. One of the crew members immediately rushed to the house and after smashing the door, the view behind it couldn't be more shocking. All the cameras were located at the exact places they were planning to put them, except it would be hard for only one person to do it in 3 seconds and disappear.

'Professor Cobb?' the scientist shouted.

There was no response, not even the echo of his own voice, which made it sound a little bit awkward. The whole crew jumped inside and the search began. They didn't leave a single unexamined room inside the house, yet professor seemed to be gone completely. All the windows were locked with gratings, so there was no way he could escape through them. When they got out of the house, they were stuck in astonishment with stoned faces. It took them a couple of minutes to realise that the scenery they were seeing was actually real. Charles Cobb's lifeless body was laying on the floor, under the thin tree. What was even more psychedelic, the tree was growing through his chest, spreading it's roots from the inside of his body, visibly tangled with his veins.

This one case not only ended one brilliant scientist's life so abruptly, but also ruined all of his achievements by simply proving the existence of supernatural, and caused a huge amount of protests and emigration from the Genon island. This one case went down to the history as "The Cobb Paradox".

1

The abstract images of gargantuan statues began fading to the sharp ringing of the alarm, forcing Jake to wake up in his dull room again. After unraveling the wires of the earphones from his neck, he squinted at the screen of his phone, and noticed 4 unread messages from Erin. He was in no hurry to answer these, knowing they were either going to be some comical sketches or music videos, so instead he just put his phone on charge, and leisurely stepped to the bathroom. At that moment his worst fear was the fact that his phone wouldn't get charged enough to stay alive until the end of the lessons.

Despite the lectures have always been boring to him, he never skipped any of them. Being present in the audience, and playing games on his phone at the same time was his favourite activity. He indeed wanted to be a good student, except his own thoughts have always kept distracting from the world around him. Daydreaming has been his obsession since the earliest childhood. Imagining fake scenarios, where he was the hero saving the day, has turned into a bad habit for him. His family was earnestly concerned about him, as he would lock himself in his room for hours, and never talk a single word to any of them. He didn't have many friends, but the people who knew him were mostly used to his obscure behaviour. Whenever he was being asked about it, his one and only justification was this: 'I like my introverted life, so you shouldn't be worried about it'. Some would say, he was a typical teenager, on the threshold of adulthood.

As he entered the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror threw a spooky gaze at him with his large green eyes, making Jake freeze in awe for a minute. That face was a chaotic mess. Even though his long rusty hair was covering half of his pale face, it couldn't stop hiding the wrinkles on his forehead and the bags under the eyes, making him look ten years older than he actually was. He didn't panic at all, knowing the solution of this problem was, in fact, quite simple. It took him only a quick rinse in the shower to make the look of a typical 19-year-old University student return to his face. Getting dressed and having breakfast took him nearly 15 minutes, and he was ready to leave the house. His hand had almost reached the door handle, when a loud vibrating sound was heard from his room. Twenty seconds later Jake finally realized that it was his phone ringing, which he had almost forgotten to take with him. Getting a phone call in the morning was very unusual for him, so he rushed through the corridor straight to his room, and picked it up immediately, without even looking at the caller's number.

'Hello?'

'Oh, you're still alive! That's good.' a familiar sonorous voice exclaimed.

Jake rolled his eyes.

'What happened, Erin?' he asked in a cold voice.

'What happened to ME? We used to be best friends back in the day. Do you remember it, Jake?'

'Who said we aren't best friends now?'

'I SAID!' Erin yelled, 'We haven't seen each other for two months. I'm not even sure your name is actually Jake anymore.'

'Alright, I got it.' Jake tried to calm her down, 'I'll be around your house at 2:00 PM, is that ok?'

'I'll be waiting then. Don't be late, cause there is something important I need to tell you.'

This sounded pretty intriguing for Jake, but he just decided to be brief.

'I'm late for the class, we'll talk about it later. See ya.' Jake hung up the call, and checked the messages he had refused to see, right away.

- HEY JAKE

- You still alive?

- Coz I have a job offer for you that'll make you finally get out of your cave

- You're gonna like this

Erin was a smart girl. Jake knew that way before meeting her in person. Their acquaintance has been the craziest moment of Jake's entire life, and apparently the best thing that has ever happened to him. It all began at high school, when his favourite activity during the lessons was not playing games on his phone, but vandalising the desks. Once he even left a drawing of a flying goat with gigantic wings on a school desk. The next day he noticed someone riding his flying goat. It was a much more detailed drawing of a creature with an elephant head, so he decided to play with the fantasy of the person who did that, by adding heart shaped sunglasses and a sword to that creature. A day later there was also an angry-looking fish, riding a skateboard next to it, which pissed Jake off entirely. Each day he kept adding more and more of his weird and confusing applesauce, trying to prove the supremacy of his own imagination, and kept getting crazier nonsense as a response. The battle went on for two weeks, and his rivalry with the unknown painter turned the desk into a phantasmagoria, until one day he noticed there was no addition to it, which left him a little bit disappointed for a couple of minutes. Then his eyes finally caught something in the corner of the desk, which was actually new to him. It was a small text, written in an unusually beautiful handwriting, most likely addressed to him:

"I'm done with this! 1:30 PM, buffet"

Jake never liked having lunch at school, but the thought that he would finally meet his art rival in person, made him impatiently dash to the buffet during the break. The crowd was so dense, it was impossible for him, to detect a person, who would most likely be the one he was looking for, especially when the identity of that person was unknown even to him. But why would the unknown artist want to meet him at the buffet? What was the reason? A quantity of questions were about to cross his mind, when someone distracted him, by tapping his shoulder from the back. He turned around, and in front of him was a rather short girl, with a pretty face, blue eyes, and ginger hair tied in a ponytail. She looked nothing like Jake was expecting her to be. Vandalising the school desks with such a messed up imagination wasn't usually inherent for girls like her. She introduced herself, as long as they got out to a quiet place so they could hear each other.

'My name is Erin Dufort. I know this may sound weird, but I'm the one ruining your genius artworks for the last couple of weeks.'

Her smile was clumsy, as though she knew she was doing something inadequate, but it was already too late to stop.

'How did you recognize me?' Jake tried to be soft.

'My lessons start at 2:30, right after you finish yours. I came early yesterday, and saw you scribbling on the desk, through the crack of the door.' After an awkward pause for a couple of seconds, she went ahead, 'Maybe you could stay after your lessons and have a... let's say... "live" scribbling battle with me?'

This was the first ever chance for Jake to have a real friend, who would be equally as insane as him, so at first, he decided to introduce himself too.

'I'm Jake Onions, by the way!'

Erin chuckled. 'Is that you real name?'

'What's wrong with my name?' Jake shouted in an infrequent high-pitched voice.

'Trust me, dude, I'm asking the same thing...'

They both started genuinely laughing, and Jake agreed to stay after the lessons for an hour to have an "art battle" with her.

Their friendship got stronger and stronger, each day they met each other. But eventually, they began growing up. At least, Erin did, while Jake was mentally staying as the 15 year-old boy, scribbling on the desks. His greatest achievement became getting applied to the Genon Art University, while Erin found herself a job in the social media. She was really good at physics, so she created a website, where she could upload videos of herself, explaining various physics phenomenons. Her hobby was noticed by the brightest minds of Genon, which led her to become the youngest Research Services Assistant at the Cobb Industries.

Despite his love towards science fiction movies, Jake could not stand physics. He has always considered it boring, and even Erin herself, wasn't able to prove him wrong. Knowing that, Erin would never offer him a job, even remotely associated with physics, but this time it was different.

At exactly 2:00 PM Jake was standing behind the door of Erin's house. His hand hadn't even reached the doorbell, when a nearly 50 year-old, grey-haired fat man opened the door. He was half of Jake's height, but looked so menacing, as though he could have beaten up twenty Jakes at the same time, and made a garden house out of their bones. It was Erin's father.

'Hey pimply! You still alive?' He yelled in a hoarse voice.

'As you can see, Mr Dufort.' Jake tried to stay calm.

'It's a pity...' The man whispered with an awkward grin on his face.

Realizing his "powerful" sense of humor wasn't able to leave a smile on Jake's gloomy face, he decided to make things even more complicated, because he didn't care.

'When are you gonna get a haircut? You look like a mushroom.' The man started nickering. Then he turned his back to Jake, and shouted as loud, as it was possible for such an indestructible human being like him, 'Hey Erin, your idiot got resurrected!'

Jake had been standing in front of the door without showing any emotion this whole time, until the man turned around again, and allowed him to enter the house. With a heavy gait, the man went to the kitchen, either to leave her daughter alone with her friend, or to think of some new stack of overly offensive jokes.

'Stop it, dad! You know he doesn't like it." Erin's voice was heard from the upstairs. As she slowly got down the stairs, Jake couldn't believe his eyes. The girl he saw looked nothing like Erin. She was wearing a formal grey suit with high heels, and her long ginger hair was no longer long and ginger. She had dyed her hair black and cut it short.

'Remember, you said you didn't know what a "pixie cut" looks like? This is it.' She pointed her finger to her head, emphasizing her new look, while Jake was standing there in astonishment.

'Yeah, these two months have really changed you, haven't they?' He murmured, while looking at Erin with his huge emerald eyes, 'Why did you dress up so... nicely, though? Are you going somewhere?'

'YES, I am!' She exclaimed. 'And YOU, Jake... You are coming with me!'

As she got closer to Jake, he noticed the changes on her face too. The amount of makeup she used to cover her face could be used to make new asphalt for the whole street. This is where Jake realized how much he appreciates Erin's face without any makeup. But he never wanted to hurt her, so he decided not to mention it. Instead he just asked the main question.

'And where are we going, if that's not a secret?'

'The Charles Cobb museum. I need to make a new video for my website dedicated to his memory.'

All Jake knew about Charles Cobb was that Erin's workplace was named after him, but he was too shy to ask for more information.

'Why do you need me, then?' He left out a confused thought.

'Don't worry, your job's not connected to physics at all. I just need a cameraman.' Erin spoke quickly in an enthusiastic voice. 'Cobb Industries is ready to pay a huge amount of money for this. They need the world to recognize their founder better.'

It didn't seem like Jake was very fond of this idea. He sat on the couch to think for a moment, then ultimately turned around and said, 'Isn't he that scientist guy, who killed himself, or something?'

'KILLED HIMSELF?' An explicitly angry shouting was heard from the kitchen.

Erin's father jumped out of the kitchen aiming his sinister eyes at Jake, while screaming at the same time.

'Go learn the history of your town, scrawny! Charles Cobb was a genius. His inventions could have helped this muddy island turn into a technological paradise, while the rest of the world was struggling with the CRT TV and crap like that. That's the reason he was KILLED! Do you hear me? KILLED! These old-fashioned bastards never wanted progress, so they got rid of this genius. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY!'

Jake has never seen Erin's dad so irritated before. For a split second he even thought of apologizing to him, but he left the house, as long as he finished his speech, closing the door so harshly, a couple of cracks instantly appeared on the wall. Erin felt embarrased, yet she had no choice, but to hide it from Jake.

'So... are you coming with me?' She said in an ungainly manner, reluctantly giving away the uneasiness she felt for her dad's behavior.

'Listen, Erin...' Jake attempted to make up a reason to politely decline her offer. 'You know I'm the guy who likes staying at home, to think about the meaning of life or stuff like that... I think I'm pretty happy with it. Please , don't draw me in your scientific rubbish!'

Erin's facial expression reminded Jake of her father, all of a sudden.

'JAKE ONIONS!' Her voice was so loud, the whole street could get an ear infection from it. 'Now YOU listen to me! People can only be happy, when they don't have enough time to think about the meaning of life. And TODAY... You're coming with me. Not because I need a cameraman, but because I want to spend some time with my one and only best friend! UNDERSTAND?'

Jake was frozen like a chicken meat, just picked up from the refrigerator. He just kept getting bullied by every person in that house. At first it was Erin's dad, morally humiliating him, for not knowing history, and now it was Erin herself. And now, he was standing on the edge of losing his one and only friendship, just because of his own laziness, so the only logical variant would be agreeing with Erin, to be her cameraman.

'Alright, you won...' An unconfident rustle was heard from his lips. 'When do we begin?'