It is no longer 2007. According to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero mania sweeping the internation, we’re almost three months into -15 BA (Born Again). In the semi-terrifying world of Trent Reznor’s new future-based concept album, the year 2022 is Year Zero, the year we were “Born Again.” Every 12 months prior to Year Zero is denoted by negatives, thus 2007 is -15 BA. If this confuses you, give up now.

In what has to be the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape, NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t checking echoingthesound, the main fan checkpoint, every hour to see what the latest update is.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (without internet), let us catch you up:

It all started with a NIN tour T-shirt. An overeager fan realized that the bolded letters on the back formed a phrase: iamtryingtobelieve, which if you add a .com to the end of it, takes us to the first piece of the puzzle. Here, we learn about the drug Parepin, which has been added to the water supplies of Orlando as protection against similar acts of bio-terrorism against Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2009 (or -13 BA…try to keep up). This site speculates whether Parepin is a medium for the government to control the minds of its citizens. When you email the site owner, who has stopped using the drug because of his conspiracy beliefs, you get this email back:

Auto-reply from water@iamtryingtobelieve.com wrote:

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.

OK, seems pretty clear we should avoid the water. The next site to emerge was Anotherversionofthetruth.com. The site seems innocent enough, until you click and drag the main page pictures, revealing another, more disturbing, picture underneath. When the under-picture is totally revealed, a link takes you to a message board. We can tell you what is discussed on the message board (a new drug called Opal, the introduction of the Angry Sniper character, and disturbing pictures of “The Presence”), but you should really check it out yourself. It’s complex.

Here, we should introduce you to “The Presence,” an ongoing motif in the game and the subject of Year Zero’s cover (above). “The Presence” is literally a giant fucking four-fingered hand that, supposedly, came out of the sky. It’s speculated that “The Presence” is everything from a giant tornado to the impending rapture to a government ploy used to scare its citizens. Whatever it is, it looks foreboding.

How are these sites found? Well, that’s where European rest rooms come in. Throughout NIN’s European tour, members of whatever all-star marketing squad is behind all this have been leaving USB drives in random concert venues. The drives are filled with new NIN songs (”My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not”), cryptic mp3s and pictures visible only via spectrographs. These files if deciphered correctly also provide us playing the game with the next clue/website….