NICO VALE

SUBJECT STATUS: PRESENT
probably.

If you're reading this because you just got here, congratulations.
You've saved yourself several months of passwords, missing photographs, mirrors, bad decisions, and people yelling at each other in a Discord server.
I'm Rex Mercury.
Private investigator.
I've been trying to figure out what happened to Nico Vale.
Below is what I know.
Not what I believe.
Not what somebody on the internet decided after staring at a photograph for six hours.
What we actually have.
Where things get less certain, I'll tell you.
Seems fair.
THE WOMAN
Name: Nico Vale.
Occupation: Actress.
At least, she was.
This is where our problems start.
There is evidence suggesting Nico was once a rising independent actress.
Movies.
Photographs.
Posters.
Memories.
People who knew her.
Except if you go looking for the career now, you won't find much.
No normal trail of credits.
No reviews.
No photographs she didn't produce herself.
It's as though somebody took an actress and removed her from the filing cabinet without removing the actress herself.
Nico remembers pieces of that life.
Pieces being the operative word.
Her memory is unreliable.
I don't mean she's lying.
I mean she remembers things that don't always agree with each other.
Places.
People.
Events.
Sometimes she recognizes somewhere she's never been.
Sometimes she finds evidence of something she doesn't remember doing.
Sometimes the evidence remembers her better than she remembers herself.
That's the Nico Vale problem in a nutshell.
Unfortunately, the nutshell has mirrors.

OCTOBER 19, 2015
Write that date down.
October 19, 2015.
Something happened to Nico.
Exactly what happened depends on which piece of evidence you're holding.
But this is the point around which everything else seems to orbit.
Nico disappeared.
Her career disappeared.
And, stranger still, it appears that people's memory of her disappeared with it.
Years later, Nico resurfaced.
Except she didn't come back with an explanation.
She came back with questions.
And a camera.
She started documenting what was happening to her because, frankly, when reality starts disagreeing with you, keeping receipts isn't the worst idea.
That's how most of you found her.

THE FILMS
There are traces of movies Nico appears to have made before she disappeared.
The problem is finding the movies.
They've vanished along with most of the conventional record of Nico's career.
One title keeps surviving:
Dead Girl Disco.
Poster. Fragments. References.
Enough to tell us it existed.
Not enough to explain why it doesn't anymore.
I don't currently have a clean, verified list of every film Nico made.
I'm not going to invent one because it makes the file look nicer.
That's how you end up working for the government.

Then there's JJ.
You'll also see him referred to as Julien in the older material.
JJ knew Nico before all this.
More importantly, he appears to remember things Nico doesn't.
He filmed her.
He searched for her.
He collected things.
He documented things.
He loved her.
I'm comfortable putting that last one in the file.
Whether that made him Nico's protector or part of the problem is considerably harder to answer.
What we have indicates that when things went bad, JJ did something I hven't uncovered yet.
He appears to have been trying to save her.
Nico lost memories.
JJ didn't.
Which meant JJ knew what happened to Nico while Nico herself didn't.
Useful arrangement for him.
Terrible arrangement for her.
And before anybody asks:
No, JJ isn't around to explain himself.
He's missing.
My current working theory is that JJ is trapped in another dimension.
Possibly permanently.
That's a theory.
His absence isn't.

THE MIRRORS
I hate this part.
Mirrors keep showing up.
Not symbolically.
Physically.
There is substantial evidence that mirrors are somehow involved in whatever happened to Nico.
People have crossed through them.
Nico has crossed through them.
JJ knew something about them.
And the deeper this investigation gets, the less comfortable I am treating them as ordinary pieces of glass.
There's also evidence suggesting that phones are involved.
Transmission wavelengths.
Mirrors.
Intention.
I realize this paragraph sounds like I got hit on the head.
Stay with me.
The working model is that certain conditions allow a person to move between realities.
And apparently what you're thinking about when you cross matters.
Intention appears to affect what you remember afterward.
JJ seems to have understood that too late.
Which may explain why he remembers what Nico lost.

THE OTHER REALITIES
Here's where this case stops being polite.
We have reason to believe this isn't the only reality.
Not alternate realities in the “wouldn't it be funny if I became a dentist” sense.
Overlapping realities.
Versions.
Different outcomes occupying different places.
And Nico may exist in more than one of them.
Actually, scratch “may.”
At this point, I'm comfortable saying:
There is more than one Nico Vale.
How many?
Don't know.
Which one came first?
Don't know.
Which one belongs here?
I'm beginning to suspect that's the wrong question.
The evidence suggests that when someone crosses, it isn't necessarily as simple as leaving one place and arriving in another.
Something can remain behind.
Something can split.
And consciousness may not stay neatly inside one version of a person.
Different versions of Nico appear to carry different pieces.
Memories.
Experiences.
Possibly different lives.
If you're wondering whether Nico understands any of this:
No.
Welcome to the investigation.

HOLLYWOOD
There's another part of the case I haven't been able to shake.
Hollywood.
There appears to be some kind of system operating behind all this.
I'm deliberately using the word system rather than giving you a secret society with matching robes and a catchy name.
Nico doesn't know what it is.
Neither do I.
What the evidence suggests is more disturbing anyway:
Someone, or something, has learned how to use these crossings.
Move people.
Move versions of people.
Keep certain versions.
Lose others.
And if you're wondering why anyone would do that, consider the business we're talking about.
Hollywood has always made money deciding which version of a person the public gets to see.
Maybe somebody figured out how to make that literal.
That's my interpretation.
Don't put it in the FACT column yet.

THE MEMORY PROBLEM
This may be the most important thing in the whole file.
Nico's memory isn't simply missing.
It's fragmented.
There are things she remembers incorrectly.
Things other people remember that she doesn't.
Things she recognizes before she knows why.
And things that seem to survive somewhere outside her entirely.
JJ once left us with a useful way of putting it:
You don't remember what happened. You remember what survived.
Keep that in mind.
It'll save you some trouble.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Photographs have been turning up throughout this case.
Some are damaged.
Some contain people nobody recognizes.
Some appear to document events Nico doesn't remember.
There's a burned Polaroid of Nico with part of her face missing.
There are missing-person photographs.
Hotel photographs.
Contact sheets.
Faces scratched out.
And now there's a photograph that bothers me more than most.
Disneyland.
Crowded street.
Normal photograph.
Except Nico appears to be standing in the background.
The photograph is dated:
1974.
Nico wasn't alive in 1974.
I've checked.
That's all I've got on that one.

THE ARTIFACTS
Photographs aren't the only things turning up.
We've collected or encountered film reels. VHS tapes. Cassettes. Maps. Letters. Newspaper clippings. Hotel keys. Tickets. Receipts. A projector bulb. A compass. A mirror shard. A butterfly. A moth.
Some contain clues.
Some lead to passwords.
Some connect to previous files.
Some have done absolutely nothing except take up space on my desk.
Yet.
That's the problem with this case.
You don't know which object matters until three weeks after you threw it in a drawer.

THE ARCHIVE
Eventually all this evidence needed somewhere to go.
That's the Archive.
Numbered files.
Photographs.
Documents.
Passwords.
Recordings.
Things the detectives found.
Things Nico found.
Things JJ left behind.
Things nobody can explain.
You're currently entering around File 100.
No, you haven't missed your chance.
More on that in a minute.

THE DETECTIVES
This is the part of the case I didn't expect.
People started watching Nico.
Then they started noticing things.
Then they started solving them.
They found passwords.
Decoded clues.
Identified locations.
Compared photographs.
Found inconsistencies.
Built theories.
Reported changes.
Eventually “audience” stopped being the right word.
They're detectives.
And some of them have been working this case longer than I have.
They have a Discord.
I'd make fun of that too, except they've solved things I couldn't.
[JOIN THE DETECTIVES →]
Tell them Mercury sent you.
They'll either help you or give you twelve new problems.
Probably both.

THE PLACES
Certain locations keep surfacing.
Hollywood.
Hotels.
Movie theaters.
Disneyland.
Rooms that feel familiar when they shouldn't.
Mirrors in places where mirrors probably shouldn't matter.
There's also something we've referred to as the In Between.
I'm not going to pretend I can give you an address.
And lately everything keeps pointing toward Disneyland.
Specifically:
33.811000, -117.921259
Which brings us to where you are now.

FILE 100
I built File 100 because my desk was becoming unusable.
It's my working board.
A Disneyland map.
Nico.
Photographs.
Missing people.
Objects.
Coordinates.
Walt Disney.
Carl Jung.
Robert Monroe.
John C. Lilly.
Jacques Vallée.
I'm not claiming those men were all sitting around a table plotting what happened to Nico.
They weren't.
I'm interested in the questions surrounding their work.
Synchronicity.
Consciousness.
Altered states.
Perception.
Other realities.
Recurring phenomena.
The boundary between something being impossible and us simply not understanding it yet.
Somewhere in there, I think there's an answer.
Or I'm going to need a bigger wall.

WHAT WE DON'T KNOW
Plenty.
We don't know exactly what happened on October 19, 2015.
We don't know who controls the crossings.
We don't know exactly how the mirrors work.
We don't know how many versions of Nico exist.
We don't know what a crossing costs.
We don't know whether JJ can come home.
We don't know whether Nico is in the reality she started in.
We don't know why she appears in a photograph from 1974. By the way, have you found it yet?
And we don't know what happens when two versions of the same person end up in the same place.
That last question has recently become considerably less theoretical.

SO WHERE SHOULD YOU START?
Right here.
Seriously.
You know enough.
You can continue from File 100 and investigate everything that happens from this point forward with the rest of us.
Nobody knows what's coming.
That's the fun part.
But if you're reading all this thinking:
Mercury, you bastard, I want the whole case.
Good.
It's still there.
Every old puzzle.
Every clue.
Every password.
Every Archive file we've preserved.
Go backward whenever you want.
Solve everything yourself.
There is no deadline.
The people who were here before you had months to investigate this together. Nobody expects you to recreate that experience in a weekend.
You're not behind.
You're just arriving now.
And from what I'm seeing on my board...
now might be a very interesting time to arrive.

Rex Mercury
Private Investigator
Case 0100: OPEN

P.S. If you notice something I've gotten wrong, tell the detectives.
They enjoy that sort of thing far too much.