Nine Inch Nails is totally messing with my head. AGAIN!

OK, I have not yet seen this reported by the mainstream press, so let's just keep this on the downlow for now, shall we? All right, here's the story on this up til now.

Nine Inch Nails has a new album coming out on April 17 called "Year Zero", right? They've just begun touring in Europe, and fans are getting to hear the new music for the first time. In addition, the band has slowly begun to leak out some new tracks from the album which sound FANTASTIC.

My favorite so far? I'm really into this super-funky-noisy track called "My Violent Heart", which you can hear here.

OK, so far, so good. So the band goes on tour and they're selling merchandise at the shows, and some intrepid fan notices on the back of the t-shirt that he bought that several letters on the back appear to be in bold for some strange reason.



Now, NIN fans are an obsessive lot by nature, so they put together the bolded letters as a sentence and it spells "I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE." So some wise guy, for the hell of it, types in http://www.iamtryingtobelieve.com/ and lo and behold, it's an actual website! It looks like some superfuturistic hallucenogenic site, where they are discussing a drug called "Parepin". This drug appears to be chronicled in a series of articles. In these articles, the government will have you believe that this is an immune system booster that will protect Americans from biological warfare. People who don't drink the water see something more sinister behind the scenes.

There is also talk of a recent phenomenon known as The Presence where many people have seen what seems to be a giant hand reaching down from the sky, Some people believe it’s god, striking down from the heavens. Others believe it’s a Parepin-induced hallucination. Others believe it’s a Parepin widthdrawl hallucination. One thing is for sure, people everywhere are starting to see signs.

There's an email address linked to the webmaster of the site, who claims to have stopped using Parepin, but any email that's sent to him will get this return email:

Auto-reply from water@iamtryingtobelieve.com wrote:
------------------------AUTO_RESPONSE--------------_--

Thank you for your interest. It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent developed to protect us from bio-terrorism. The Administration is acting purely in the best interests of its citizens; to suggest otherwise was irresponsible and I deeply regret it.

I'm drinking the water. So should you.

Hm, ok, that's creepy.

So, then people started looking at the tracklisting of the album as it was being revealed on the NIN website, and through the bolded numbers and letters there, it led them to a different website: www.anotherversionofthetruth.com

At first, it looks like a very patriotic site, but you can slowly click on and drag away the imagery to expose a totally ravaged landscape like this:


Under the new imagery reveals a hidden message board, and then within that are a series of audio clips (here, here, and here) of people complaining about government intervention.

From this, we can now figure out that "Year Zero" is a serious concept album, set in the year 2022, which has been rechristened by the government as 0000 (or Year Zero, see?) with a story to explain where we are and how we got here. In Year Zero, there is no longer a distinct separation of Church and State. Perhaps due to an onslaught of bioterrorism attacks, the government has assumed totalitarian control and used the threat of future terrorist attacks to justify their absolute power.

From that, there appear to be a series of characters emerging, each of with their own websites:

Church of Plano

The Church of Plano is a sola scriptura organization that uses the threat "Whoever Resists the Authority Resists God" to legitimize and support the current Administration. Not much is known about the Church, but it has taken a special interest in the Presence and is sponsoring a "Neighborhood Cleansing Program" so members can "put their faith into action".

105th Airborne Crusaders

Alongside the Church, the 105th Airborne Crusaders, a unit of soldiers whose purpose is to protect and police "God's green Earth" is further propagating the government's political and religious control of the nation. This faith-based squadron was created in -13 BA as a response to the bioterrorist attacks in Los Angeles. The 105th was formed by "those men and women who kept a personal relationship with our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ and allowed the Holy Ghost to guide their rifles true."

Be The Hammer

Be The Hammer appears to be a resistance site, linked to at the www.anotherversionofthetruth.com message board. It contains seven different sections or "entries".

Consolidated Mail Systems

- This is the site for what must be the main mail service of society (perhaps). It features a description of Opal (a new drug, supposedly for recreational use) stolen from a police officer and his reference handbook, as well as numerous crude drawings, including one of The Presence. It is definitely worthy to note that the page reads "ANGRY SNIPER sent you this message on Thursday, Feb 10, 0000." The title Angry Sniper is most likely a reference to the sound clip that features an angry guy shooting people with a sniper rifle. Interestingly, if you try to click any link on this page, it gives you a warning:

The page at http://www.consolidatedmailsystems.com wrote:

WARNING CODE 24.10.4 (All page functionality disabled): You are not the citizen assigned to this account. Close this window immediately and stay where you are. Authorities will be in contact shortly for appropriate reeducation.

Hm, OK, that's really creepy.

Now things get really weird. First, a new USB flash drive was found in the women's bathroom at a NIN concert in Barcelona, Spain. On the drive was a new song: Me, I'm Not and a odd mp3 file, 2432.mp3. This 2432 when run through a spectrograph revealed a new phone number to call: 1-216-333-1810. The phone number was a recorded phone tap provided by the US Wiretap. Now, after listening to the message, the listener is told to go to:

http://www.uswiretap.com/71839j/


Meanwhile, another fan buys a different t-shirt at a concert and realizes that some of the numbers on the shirt are discolored:



The numbers on the shirt spell out the phone number: 1-310-295-1040, which contains another audio message with clues and a clip of Nine Inch Nails' new single "Survivalism", which you can hear in its entirety here.

Finally, in a totally obsessive vein, fans have begun to discover a series of codes hidden in ALL of these sites that all correspond in a series that indicates that more are coming, but there's no way to know how or when.

THIS IS MAKING ME CRAZY. I'm now completely sucked into this mystery and it's really hard to figure out where this is leading, but I'm totally hooked on it now. There's part of this story that I've left out due to space, but if anyone has any new info, please let me know and make sure you check out the NIN Wiki (who supplied a lot of this info) for the latest update.

Meanwhile, I'm really starting to feel a little paranoid about all this. Stay tuned.