lain stuff (temp filename)

I don’t know exactly when it was first learned but at some point I thought that ‘to read quickly’ was synonymous with ‘having greater intelligence’. Here’s an idea which helped to debunk that notion for me.

One event can be described in two different ways by changing the subject in reference. For example:

Someone receives spam mail on their phone and deletes it.

A phone receives information and that information then disappears.

This analysis is split into three parts. In the first, I will be giving a bit of background, information about the context of Serial Experiments Lain. In the second, I’ll be providing clues: key aspects of Serial Experiments Lain to think over that might help you, the viewer, attempt to ‘solve’ some of the questions and mysteries in this show. In the third part, I will be providing my own interpretations of the events that were displayed and explaining the reasoning by which I came to such conclusions.

Who is Lain?

SEL was made in 1997 and influenced by a wide variety of sources, including writings, philosophical ideas, and even conspiracy theories. One key writing that sets up the backdrop for the story and does a good job of portraying the mentality that went into its construction is Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Cyberia’ (oh look it’s the name of that club from layer 02!). At the time when Cyberia was written, the internet as a tool and an entity was just beginning to exert its influence, both in the business world and in the personal lives of citizens. To many corporate executives and others who held power, the concept of hacking into databases or even sending or intercepting data online may as well have been magic. The digitisation of information unintentionally provided a whole new industries, as well as jobs for groups of people that never would have otherwise expected them. Recreational drug users and layabouts that hacked into companies for fun were suddenly finding themselves at the receiving end of job offers – job offers to protect those same companies from the sort of hacking that they were doing. These same people ended up shaping how many others saw the online world: a psychedelic fuelled culture of idealists and dreamers, very much unlike the internet ruled by corporate monoliths we know of today.

It’s from that era of boundless opportunity and egoless perspective that the work known as Serial Experiments Lain took shape.

Each ‘Layer’ of SEL follows an overarching story, but picks a unique angle from which to display an aspect of Lain’s growth from a mute blank slate to an opinionated and emotional being. SEL documents the journey from a rudimentary intellectual state to a full-blown ego; the journey of the growth of Lain’s mind.

Each episode gives clues as to the nature of Lain and of her mental growth. In the following part, I’ll be going over some key events and aspects of the show that form clues through which two coherent interpretations of the events shown can be made.

==1.WEIRD==

The series begins with Lain and her classmates receiving emails from a girl, Chisa, who recently committed suicide. We learn of this through expositional dialogue presented to a blank and unaware Lain. From the inside of a classroom, we witness her shifting perspective as she struggles to grasp words written on a blackboard.

‘The wired’ is presented as a towering web of wires, an ever present humming that layers over the buildings and roads. We’re given a stark contrast in visuals each time Lain walks: the world of blood and shadow below, a place in which mystery and ambiguity abound, a place dark and rich in humanity; the world of light and data above, a place in which all is illuminated and nothing is sacred, a place that is sterile and lifeless.

==2. GIRLS==

There are almost no interactions between Lain and her family. In our first introduction to Lain’s sister, Mika, we find her looking slightly repulsed as she had apparently gone to look into Lain’s room under the assumption that Lain was talking to another human being, only to find her having a pseudo-conversation with her Na’vi.

Is it that Mika doesn’t think of the Na’vi as sentient or that she doesn’t think of Lain as a real and sane person?

We see distance between Lain and her three classmates during the opening of their conversation as the camera pans from one group to Lain and back – almost mimicry of data travelling back and forth.

In the second episode we’re also introduced to new mind-altering drugs. It seems like they’re popular in Cyberia.

When Lain sits in class, a common theme is that everything is reduced to the single sensory experience of rhythmic tapping, just as morse code and digital information is sent – incomprehensible to us.

The key scene of the second episode occurs in Cyberia: a gunman, of whom it is suggested has consumed mind-altering drugs (the ‘Accela’ introduced at the beginning of the episode), has opened fire on a few patrons. Upon seeing Lain clearly he freaks out, his adrenaline-fueled demeanour giving way to a gibbering psychosis. Something changes in Lain’s composure as though a switch is flicked and she approaches him fearlessly despite him shakily aiming a gun at her face (a bluff?).

“You’re that scattered God’s . . . I don’t want anything to do with it! Nothing! The wired can’t be allowed to interfere with the real world! I don’t want anything to do with it! Who the hell are you?”

Lain’s response:

“No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.”

Hearing this truism is enough to change the man’s decision. He gives up on the idea of killing Lain and instead kills himself.

==3. PSYCHE==

Does Lain forget who Arisu was? Upon walking back into her old house, she finds no sign of life except her navi. Actually, upon walking back into her old house, she sees no sign of life except her navi.

“Goodnight Navi”

“Goodnight Lain”

Lain wakes up to a room that is tempting to describe as eerily light. A shot of a breakfast is shown. There’s no clear indication if it was for Lain or her mother, although the dynamic of their confrontation certainly didn’t suggest that it was Lain’s.

Her guardians (are they parents?) come across as extremely cold to her, even uncaring. Something is, well, off.

“If you look at the psyche as a mere processor, you lose sight of the whole. As a multi-purpose information terminal, the Navi has come into wide use even among grade-schoolers.”

In terms of psychology, ‘psyche’ is the self, the totality of the human mind, the soul.

In the third episode, Lain receives a ‘psyche’ for her Navi.

In something of a mimicry of her prior conversation with her mother, Lain attempts to ask her father about the ‘psyche chip’ she has picked up. Again, Lain is distant and avoids coming close to the adult. Again, the adult is dismissive of her and avoids helping her. Not really relevant, but an interesting part of their character development to note nonetheless.

Upon re-entering Cyberia, Lain is accosted by an older man that apparently recognises her from another time.

“Let’s have another rave, okay? I’ll leave the planning to you.” (emphasis mine)

“You’re Lain, aren’t you? I saw you once. In the wired.” We’re given the impression that whatever Lain people know of from the wired is something of a polar opposite to the Lain that we’ve been introduced to.

The ending scene of the third episode has Mika once again walking into Lain’s room, as Lain is reconstructing her navi, having apparently added a psyche to it. Lain is talking about abstract terms in full sentences, whilst simultaneously piecing the navi back together. It ends with a digitized voice and overlaid images cross-fading into a close-up of Lain smiling and saying, “Welcome home sis!”

==4. RELIGION==

Between ep. 3 and ep. 4 we go from a single computer with a single monitor to literally stacks of processors strewn around the room, with several monitors surrounding the main console. Potentially a skip forward in time?

Once Lain goes back to her room after hanging out with friends, a voice is communicating with her from the wired. It’s not too much of a leap to imagine a transition from a purely audio connection to one that integrates other senses, and at the time of the show’s production it would have been difficult to tell the order and timing with which such improvements in technology would arrive.

We cut to Cyberia where the man who had asked Lain about a future rave an episode ago (we find out he goes by the name JJ) has a conversation with Lain. The music and appearance of the interior have both changed. He is wearing something over his eyes. It turns out that although Lain isn’t there, he was under the impression that she was, at least while he had his back turned to where he assumed she was at the time. It is in this way that we see how Lain is able to have conversations with people that are connected to the wired with no regard to their location.

There is a slow introduction of the Knights, a religion in the world of SEL, the Knights being people that worship the ‘God of the Wired’.

“Don’t worry, I’m still me.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

The knights do not physically exist, but are rather a thought itself that occurs within the Wired. They can be thought of as a religion that is spreading through the Wired.

We end with a scene where the same unnamed goons that have been stalking the premises over the last few episodes are spotted. Lain is ‘being targeted’ and ‘removes their vision’. Not particularly relevant, but it helps to set the scene for the following episode.

==5. DISTORTION==

If you can hear it, it is speaking to you. And if you can see it, then it is your  . . . distortion.

We hear a voice engaging in some rudimentary philosophy, referencing mankind with a rather disparaging tone, discussing what absurd creatures they have evolved into. He then posits the wired as an escape from their existential prison. We discover at this point that the voice was not directed as us, the audience, but was something Lain was hearing; a voice contacting Lain in a manner similar to the way in which Lain had talked to JJ in the previous episode. The owner of this voice calls himself God.

Mika witnesses a car crash. Suddenly, the show cuts to a much more important scene. Lain is in her room, at twilight, asking a doll to tell her a story that she doesn’t know about. A voice emanates, presumably from the doll:

“There is nothing that you don’t know. I can’t tell you a story that doesn’t exist.”

You understand, don’t you?

“Well, how about this, then? For every event, there is first a prophecy. An event first comes into existence when there is a prophecy.”

“Who? Who makes the prophecies?”

It would be strange to have talk such as ‘For every event, there is first a prophecy’ only to then show a series of coincidental events. Someone is passing out packaged towelettes to people at a sidewalk, including Mika. An obnoxious boy holding a drink ‘accidentally’ spills said drink on Mika’s arm. Mika decides to tear open the towelettes, and upon unfolding it, sees writing on it:

“The other side is overcrowded. The dead will have no place to go”.

We hear a voice:

“Is she crazy?”

Mika then notices Lain standing in the middle of the crosswalk, whispering incoherently. It’s implied that the voice heard was directed at Lain, but for all we know, it could have been directed at Mika.

Mika then witnesses a building-side screen’s display distort into a visage of Lain’s face.

Lain finds out from her classmates that someone is pulling off hacking stunts such as misdirecting traffic to cause accidents, intercepting image data and displaying Lain’s face on public screens and during news broadcasts.

Later at a café said classmates are used as exposition (eww lazy café scene exposition!) to let us know that ‘the knights’ are involved and that the phrase ‘fulfil the prophecy’ is connected to their work in some way.

Cut to another philosophical scene. It’s reasonable to assume that these dialogues between Lain and entities of questionable sentience are the frameworks which the audience has been given to make sense of the scenes which they precede:

“It’s reasonable to see the Wired as an upper layer of the real world. In other words, physical reality is nothing but a hologram of the information that flows through the Wired.”

“Mom?”

“This is because the body, the activity of the human brain, is merely a physical phenomenon caused by synapses delivering electrical impulses.”

“I…”

“The body exists only to verify one’s own existence.”

“Are you… Are you really my mom? Are you?”

This (dia?)logue is asking of the viewer that they flip their very perception of reality, as it is presented in this show, on its head! The suggestion presented is that everything that has been (or is yet to be) presented as a real object in the world of this show is potentially a mere distortion in the mind of a character or characters.

Mika sees things.

Back to Lain.

“It may be that what flows through the wired isn’t merely electrical information.”

“Huh?”

“If we assume that it was the development of electricity and phones that brought about the formation of the wired, then I have to wonder if another world was created at that moment.”

“uh…”

“Here in the real world, God exists only as a concept. But in the Wired, there may be a sort of Deus-like embodiment.”

“God?”

“I don’t know whether or not it should be called a God. But at the very least, I think it has the same kind of power that is written of in myths.”

“I think I may have talked with God”

“It’s possible that the Deus of the Wired may already have enough power to affect the real world in some instances. Yes… In the form of prophecy.”

“Prophecy?”

To put it in other words:

The construction of prophecy itself can be an actual cause of the prophecy’s fulfilment.

The implications of that statement, if accepted as truth, are profound and long-reaching.

We get another shot of Lain’s room. There are now several extra components all around the room, and many more screens, providing the only sources of light.

“Who is it today?”

Does ‘it’ refer to Mika or one responsible for what it was that happened?

If people can connect to one another, even the smallest voice will grow loud. If people can connect to one another, even their lives will become longer.

So…

==6. KIDS==

The episode begins with another glance at Lain’s room. It’s entirely indistinguishable from what it once was. Holographic images float over Lain’s head. There are columns of lights nearby from various other new machines of uncertain purpose. A sloshing sound from someone entering the room indicates that she flooded the fucking floor just for the sake of keeping the room cool. All sorts of bizarre foreign electrical devices are almost haphazardly stacked on top of each other, plugged into a network of plugs and pipes, like the arteries and nerves that connect the organs of some mechanical alien beast.

Lain’s father(?) is the one that strode into the room. He is lost for words. I would be too.

When taken into Lain’s perspective we see something else. She’s having a conversation with a group of voices, in no discernible location, giggling and expressing her excitement at the new protocol soon to come out. It turns out that the ones being friendly with her are the knights.

Lain sees a child standing still in a stance of worship while on her way to school.

Alice and co are once again concerned with Lain’s dissociative habits. What they see is her regressing into a passive state. Of course, what has happened is that Lain has been directing the bulk of her social energies into communication over the wired.

Lain decides not to be a stuck up introvert and goes out shopping with Alice +2. While they’re walking out on the street, Reika (don’t worry I had to look up that name too) points out another kid standing with arms raised in reverence, symbolic of worship. They brush it off as an anomaly, however Lain soon notices one kid after another all raising their arms in worship.

Lain then stops as she sees the clouds in the sky begin to part and gasps as she sees an image of herself revealed. People nearby can all apparently see this image too and express surprise, confusion and/or awe. Alice notices that Lain has stopped and so turns to see what Lain is looking at and gasps.

The image disappears and the scene fades.

There’s a scene with Mika; the mother of the house absentmindedly asks her questions. When the camera cuts to Mika, she looks dead to the world, stuck in a frame of mind. The shot of her is blurry and background objects are out of focus, distorted, and incorrect in scale, suggesting a distorted and incoherent frame of mind. Don’t do drugs kids.

A perturbed Lain strides back into her room, wipes makeup off of her face, and starts an investigation… into a child killer scientist, Professor Hodgeson (not a real person by the way), who had conducted an experiment on a large group of children that resulted in their deaths.

The KIDS project apparently took some unknown thing (psi) unique to children and used it to enhance the function of a specific area of the brain. This apparently had catastrophic results, but the schematics for that project found their way onto the wired.

I intend to keep this segment as detached from my specific interpretation of events as possible. If we see the wired as the internet, KIDS is a dummy ‘repeatable catastrophe’; ‘’children are susceptible to psi’ is a dummy predicate’ has a double meaning.

Conversation with Hodgeson gives Lain a moment of clarity:

“-you’re powerful. Incredibly powerful.” *snip* “I wonder where the power of the rogues that run the KIDS emulation and this other kind of power come from?”

“Rogues?” It strikes Lain that she knows of some. Her conversation with Hodgeson draws to a close and she’s left at a crossroads in the wired (Symbolism? In my Serial Experiments Lain? No weigh!!1). Left to her own thoughts.

“Knights.”

A mostly one-sided conversation confirms Lain’s suspicions and she expresses contempt for the very same people she was having such joyous conversation with at only the start of this episode.

Like a cat, Lain suddenly notices the return of the laser pointers. Unlike a cat, she chases them to their source, under the suspicion that the ‘men in black’ are (at least some of) the knights she had been conversing with.

While questioning their identity, they remain silent and fixated on her room. One of them eventually tells Lain to get down – an explosion occurs.

“They must have planted a parasite bomb in your coolant system.”

“It almost sounds like you’re saying you didn’t do it.”

“It wasn’t us.”

“Who was it, then? Who did it?!”

“The Knights.”

==7. SOCIETY==

The episode begins once again in Lain’s room. In an online discussion she laments over how she and the ‘Lain of the wired’ seem to be becoming more different from each other. Having established Lain’s na’vi as fixed (spilling out of the side of the house at this point), and her sister as broken, we get introductions to a few of the ‘Knights’. The focus of this episode diverts away from Lain and toward the society she inhabits.

In a parallel to the first episode, there is another scene taking place in Lain’s classroom. This time Lain is tapping on a pocket PC with a stylus and Arisu is staring at her with a face of bewilderment.

Arisu checks up on Lain, who, having recently had her sense of friendship with the knights betrayed, realises the value of Arisu’s friendship and expresses her gratitude at her constant efforts. Alice’s facial expression is quite interesting: in her interaction with Lain she feels like she’s back in her element, in her area of expertise. Lain’s skin looks sickeningly pale in contrast with Alice’s.

We discover by news report that the ‘Information Control Center’ of the ‘Information Bureau’ has been hacked, causing information in the Wired to be in disarray. The spectacle is left vague; its sole purpose to the plot of the story is that it was done by the ‘Knights’ and that public rumour and speculation leads to discussion about Lain. One gem that’s included is

Have you ever seen the lain?

One of the members of the knights is speculated to be a ‘bored housewife’. Receiving a delivery from the same delivery man that gave Lain her Navi, she hears from her son that he wants to go over to a friend’s house to play a game. Her response is uncharacteristic of a typical parent: she wonders why he would bother to when he can play with his friend over the net. What follows from her is a declaration of opinion. Not to her son, but to herself; to the audience: “The wired and the real world are the one and the same”.

The ‘men in black’ show up and offer Lain answers of a sort in exchange that she go with them.

A man roaming the streets with a visor and backpack has taken the notion of the wired and the physical world being the one and the same and given it the old college try. While searching for and trying to join ‘the knights’ he finds himself looking at an image of Lain.

Lain finds herself at Tachibana Labs where she is kindly asked to fix an old pc.

The two scenes collide as the ‘knights fanatic’ sees what he perceives to be Lain, assumes Lain is one of the knights, and requests to her that he can be one too. The PC that Lain had just fixed inexplicably jumps to life and relays the whole conversation from his perspective.

The knights kill the wannabe knight, but more interesting is the conversation between the representative of Tachibana Labs and Lain. It’s tempting to just relay it in full.

“Some say that the Wired doesn’t have political borders like the real world. But there are far too many nonsense-spouting anarchists or idiots who think that pranks are a revolution.

But the Knights don’t seem to be either of those.”

“Knights…”

“I don’t know how much of what you do is intentional. Your presence in the Wired is highly unnatural. And the Knights seem to have a special interest in you.”

“I… I don’t… I don’t understand what you’re…”

“The Knights… You’ve been in direct contact with them at some point.”

“But I… I don’t…”

“At any rate, it looks like they want to use you for something. We believe that is something that must be prevented, no matter the cost.”

Emphasis mine; there’s more.

“Iwakura Lain, are you and the Lain of the Wired one and the same?

Who are you?”

“I… I’m…”

“Are your parents your real parents?”

“Huh?”

“Is your sister your real sister?”

“W-What are you saying? O-of course they are…”

This continues into a full blown interrogation. Lain apparently has no answers regarding the birthdays or birthplaces of any of her family members or even herself.

“I… What does it matter? It…”

“You don’t know? You don’t know anything?

Are you okay? You don’t know anything.”

At this moment Lain’s disposition entirely changes, going from being distraught to a haughty and pointed demeanour.

“Shut up, damn it… Who cares about that crap? Like any of it matters…”

“You’re Lain of the Wired?”

“So what if I am?”

“If you’re here without a device, you know that the border between the real world and the Wired is starting to crumble, don’t you?”

“So?”

“We believe that to be dangerous.”

“Sounds interesting.”

While attempting to barge out of the room, Lain is pulled back by one of the men in black, one we will momentarily discover to be called ‘Karl’; one that insists on having a word to Lain:

“You are what’s dangerous.”

That conversation between the representative of Tachibana Labs and Lain operated on multiple levels, contingent on the scope in which the character ‘Lain of the Wired’ exists.

The episode ends with the wannabe ‘Knight’ lying in a ditch, presumably dead at the hands of the Knights.

==8. RUMORS==

Fittingly, the episode about rumours begins with the speculations of several characters. Lain finds out about a rumour that there’s a fight between various companies over control of a new protocol; a new protocol is being designed to remove the current throughput limit on data transfer across the wired; controlling the new protocol is nothing short of controlling the economy of the wired. Lain hears rumour that Tachibana General Labs is involved with sabotage about this protocol development.

Lain goes to the kitchen and finds her sister babbling incoherently once again on the way. Her parents are seated at the dining table, still as statues. While Lain fetches herself a drink she tries to make conversation with her parents, by jokingly talking about how someone doubted that they were really her parents. She is rewarded with silent blank stares. It’s impossible to tell how much or little they know. The air is thick with implication over what has been left unsaid.

Alice confronts Lain at school. We find out that someone has been spreading a rumour over the wired that Alice has a crush on a teacher.

Exploring the wired once again Lain is literally surrounded by many mouths spouting heresay. Someone that claims to be everywhere at once in the wired begins conversing with Lain; the same voice that Lain mentions having talked with before back in episode 5.

“But if you define God as one who exists everywhere in that other world? If that’s what you mean, then yes. I suppose you could call me that. I have only a slight influence on the workings of the world, however.”

“Who the hell are you?!”

“I am you.

You must have realized that another you has always existed in the Wired. You are merely a hologram of that other you. You are just a body.

”You expect me to believe that? That’s impossible. It’s crazy.”

“But you don’t think that the you in the real world is the same as the one standing here in the Wired, do you?”

“But I’m me…”

Lain snaps out of her trawl in the wired to find the whole class staring at her. Someone sends her a message:

Peeping Tom

Running from the class and through the school, Lain only witnesses everyone around her staring at her, unmoving. She calls out for Alice.

A window pane cracks and we get a glimpse of another Lain that turns on the spot and offers a faint smile.

Alice’s masturbation is interrupted when she sees Lain sitting on her bed and grinning at her.

“Lain!

You’ve always been sitting there quietly, watching me?!

You saw what I didn’t want anybody to know! When I didn’t want anybody to see!”

We then cut to a shot of Lain lying in her bed terrified, as electrical signals are violently pulsing through the wires in the streets outside.

Lain hides her vision from the wires.

Lain is left in flesh and blood (the blotches of red in a sea of shadows – the same artistic style presented back in the first episode), surrounded by darkness.

Lain sees Lain sitting on a bed and grinning at her.

“Who are you? You’re not me. I’d never do what you do.”

“I…”

“Stop it! Why are you acting like the part of me that I hate?

The other Lain’s laughter drives Lain to anger: she clasps her hands around the laughing Lain’s throat.

“You…”

“I’m committing suicide!”

“Why? Why are you warm?

Why do I have to feel your body heat?”

“Hey, I’m Lain, aren’t I?”

“No!” The flesh and blood Lain cries out the exclamation.

The ride of symbolism goes on. Lain finds herself surrounded by ‘dummy-Lains’. These represent the collective individual perceptions of Lain. Lain expresses her confusion and The ‘God’ of the wired responds:

“What are these things?”

“They’re all you. I said that you’ve always existed in the Wired, didn’t I?

You’re the same as me. You’re omnipresent in the Wired. Wherever anyone is, wherever they go, you have always been there. You’ve watched what they didn’t want others to see.

You’ve told everyone about it, that’s all.

It was the right thing to do. The Wired’s information should be shared, shouldn’t it?”

“Everything you say is a lie.”

“Why is that?”

“Arisu and the others said that they saw me in the Wired when I wasn’t there.

As long as I’m aware of myself, my true self is inside me! You’re telling me that these dupes are me? What a load of garbage! I…

If I’m really what you say I am, then…”

“Then what, Lain?”

“Their memories of being seen by Lain… I could delete that information!”

“That’s true. Give it a try. You were born with that kind of power.”

Lain discovers that when such an action is performed, the person her friends know as Lain is no longer her. It’s some other Lain.

“That’s right! Lain is Lain, and I’m me.”

9. PROTOCOL

The children of the internet think that they can kill God and construct a new one in its place.

The book of revelation states that an antichrist will arise: “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

Episode 9 of Serial Experiments Lain begins with narration that we can use to frame the rest of the information presented in not just this episode, but the entire final arc of the series. Sort of like a protocol. A protocol is an official procedure or system of rules that governs affairs.

If you want to be free of suffering, you should believe in God. Whether or not you believe in Him, God is always by your side.

==PROTOCOL==

A protocol is the accepted or established code of procedure or behaviour in a group. The definition extends further. It’s not just for any group, but for any situation. Any situation has a protocol. Even the rules by which you watch a show have a protocol. That you interpret the events inside each episode based on the title of the episode and the narration that occurs at the start of it is the protocol of watching Serial Experiments Lain.

We’re going full meta here. The protocol about protocol is that we would follow the protocol by viewing the following events in protocol through a lens focused on protocol.

And what exactly is the narration? It’s about God. It also therefore is the presentation of a protocol of human interaction in action, one used by a large chunk of the world.

The episode begins by discussing a recent historical event. A craft of some kind crashed in a desert in New Mexico, sparking the Roswell incident.

“What it was has yet to be proven. Conjecture has become fact, and rumour has become history.”

It’s strange that the events are described as ‘yet to be proven’. The importance is of course noting that a historical narrative about the unknown events has come into being.

If you’re thinking that this episode sounds ‘anti-religion’ you couldn’t be more correct. There’s an old joke online about the internet being the place ‘religion comes to die’, and that idea will be explored through the lens of debunking conspiracy theory.

Lain has rewritten her own history, deleting data that her friends knew about her from their minds. We see her back in a bear suit, regressed to childlike behaviour, slovenly musing, while her machine lays dormant. The symbolism of a bear waking from hibernation is hilarious with its subtlety: If someone glances at this scene out of context all they would see is a bear. Lain then sees an alien.

Small childlike appearance, giant head and eyes, no hair, elongated limbs.

The conspiratorial narrative about the Roswell incident involved people turning something that did happen into something that didn’t. This segues nicely into Lain’s next question:

“How could I turn something that did happen into something that didn’t?”

Lain is back in the wired, talking with the omnipresent voice: rather, she is talking to many (mostly) disembodied voices.

“I don’t know you. But you know me…”

“The flow of information doesn’t always go both ways. Since the moment of the Wired’s creation, you have been here. Here, you are free.”

“I’m trying to tell you that that’s not me!”

“I suppose.” “How long have we been here then? At the very least, we cannot have been here since this world was created.” “That has nothing to do with it! If a being is remembered, that proves that it’s part of a record!” “That’s preposterous. How old do you think this ‘Lain’ girl is? She’s still a child!”

“Let’s not worry about me now, okay? I…”

All of the ‘part beings’ immediately fade out of sight, cutting Lain off.

We’re treated to another piece of history: the origins of multimedia data storage came from the concept of ‘memory extension’. Media systems came about from the idea of increasing the data a person would have available to recall at will.

JJ spots Lain at a bar. She’s wearing a lab coat. He hands her a package that he recalls her having left behind. It’s a processor with a ‘knights’ logo.

Dolphins are able to conduct wide-range networking via ultrasonic waves. Apparently, a group of researchers in July, 2015 managed to build lightweight ultrasonic transmitters and receivers using graphene.

Back in Cyberia, Lain asks the boy that told her about her psyche chip (Taro) to go out with her as he promised to do, something he doesn’t remember, but regardless agrees to. After inviting him into her room, she shows him the processor she’s been given.

“You’re with the Knights, aren’t you?”

Another interesting line from Lain:

“I don’t know whether or not there’s another me in the Wired. But there’s definitely no other me here in the real world. The other one with a body has only appeared in the club. You only need to manipulate the memories of the people there, right?”

Lain intends on removing all false depictions of her from the Wired and thus from history.

“It’s almost over, isn’t it? Finally.”

“So while we still can, we should…”

Mika is struck dumb, receiving orders. She sits in blackness, on the floor, outside of the room where her parents are kissing. There is no lifelike redness to the shadows. The camera zooms out infinitely from the scene, as if being slowly dropped in to a fake black hole with no spin.

We now find out that the data at JJ’s place (a.k.a. Cyberia) is able to change how the very room appears to look. Data is changing how a scene looks to the human. This is (also) a protocol.

The chip Lain had been given was a malicious one. She finds out by threatening to shove it in the kid’s mouth, analogous to how one would insert a floppy disk or USB thumbdrive into a computer.

“I-It’s non-volatile memory! It’ll overwrite existing memories!”

An interesting description of the knights comes from Taro:

“The knights are users who are fighting to make the only truth there is into a reality.”

He elaborates further:

“The truth has power because it’s the truth. And because it’s the truth, that makes it just. It’s persuasive, isn’t it? Don’t you want truth like that?”

Taro kisses Lain and gives her a physical piece of information, mouth-to-mouth.

Xanadu is the name of a project of which the objective was to construct a written library of information stored and transmitted across satellites freely available at every terminal, a concept realized in hypertext.

http stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. www stands for World Wide Web, which is an information space, or memory bank that’s accessible from terminals around the world, text formatted with HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

The information given to Lain by Taro is this: if someone is trying to alter Lain’s memories to reflect one truth, what’s to say that someone hasn’t done the same to her already? Lain decides to run a check on her actual memory. We now discover Lain’s history.

Why are people filling up the internet with lies?

The earth’s human population is approaching the number of neurons in the brain.

Douglas Rushkoff proposes that the consciousness of the Earth itself might be awakened when all humans on Earth become collectively networked. The network’s evolution would follow a neural model, and just as neurons within the human brain are connected by synapses, the Earth itself would become a neural network.

We now cut back to a view of Lain staring up at the camera, as a child would stare at a parent.

“There is only one truth. God.”

The omnipresent voice replies.

“Yes. Me.”

While we’re blending truth with fiction: Another documentary-style scene is presented to us, this time providing completely false information from the same trustworthy narrator. Not false information per se, but information that is of the world of Lain, and not of God; information that is from the show, and not from our history: namely that Schumann Resonance can be used to wirelessly connect humans to the internet without the need for devices.

Eiri Masami is the character that is responsible for this change in the new protocol: humans are now capable of interacting with the Wired using their own minds. He was then dismissed from Tachibana General Labs and his body found on a train line a week later.

The episode ends with Lain and Eiri facing off against each other, alone on the empty street.

==10. LOVE==

Back to Lain and Eiri. I’ve decided to italicise portions that were spoken with an echoing voice in this back and forth, so that it can become understandable:

L: “There is only one truth. God”

E: “Yes. Me. Isn’t that right, Lain?”

L: “You’re God?”

E: “Yes. I am God.

—

Why are you God? I don’t understand. You’re dead aren’t you? A dead human. Somebody like that can’t be God, can they?”

L: “I realized that I had no need for a body. To die is merely to abandon the flesh.”

E: “That’s… That’s just what Chisa said.”

L: “I suppose she did, at that.

I caused the protocol that governs the Wired to evolve.”

E: “Yeah. That’s what you did. But a protocol is just an agreement.”

L:”Yes, but I incorporated code that operates on a higher phase.”

E: “So?”

L: “There is compressed information mixed into the protocol.”

E: “What kind of information?”

L: “Human memories. Mine.

The thoughts, history, memories, and emotions of the man named Eiri Masami.”

E: “What does that mean?”

L: “I can live forever as an anonymous entity in the Wired, and will be able to rule it with information.”

E: “What do you think a being like that should be called?”

L: “A god.”

E: “There is no God.”

L: “Yes. Even if I were an omnipresent being and could influence others, with no one to worship me, I am no god.”

E: “But you had them. Or made them, I should say.”

—

L: “Knights.”

E: “You no longer need a body, Lain.”

L: “That’s a lie!”

With no message at the start of the show, this dialogue is what we have to work with as a basis for interpreting the events of this episode. Try reading the sectioned off middle of the conversation as though Lain and Eiri’s roles in the conversation were switched. Lain thinks that she needs a body.

Lain walks into her class and walks to where her desk should be. It’s missing. No one can see her. A teacher hands a paper through her to the girl sitting behind her.

“I’m real. I’m alive. I’m here. Why is this happening? Was it something I did? I always tried to keep something like this from happening. I always tried not to say anything weird.

Can it be true? I’m not supposed to have a body?”

Lain turns to see Alice staring her down as she speaks:

“You’re not needed in the real world.”

Blood and flesh Lain walks home, dejected and isolated. It’s empty. Magazines are strewn about. Food is still in the fridge. Plants have withered and died. Lain looks into what I think is Mika’s room. Clothes and books are scattered on the floor. Mika called. No toys.

Lain sees a familiar face:

“Papa?”

“This is goodbye, Miss Lain.

You must have figured it out by now. Our work here is finished. It was only for a short time, but I know I didn’t do enough for you. You’re now free to become anything you want. No, you were free all along. I wasn’t given permission to say goodbye, but I loved you.

It’s not that I enjoyed playing house… Maybe I envied a being like you. Goodbye.”

“Wait! Don’t leave me alone!”

“Alone? You’re not alone.

If you connect to the Wired, everyone will welcome you. That’s the sort of being you were.”

Interestingly, the next time Lain talks to the Wired, the first voices that respond are female:

“Do you want to do anything, Lain?” “This is your world, Lain.”

“Who are the Knights? They’re the ones who made the fake me, right?”

“I’m not sure.” “No, it’s possible. They say you can trace the origin of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus back to the Knights Templar. They’ve used that invisible human network, the collective unconsciousness, since long before the Wired was born.” “What do you want to do, Lain?”

“Knights… Who are the Knights?”

“You really want to know, don’t you, Lain?”

“The Wired’s God is a god because He has worshipers.”

Taro and friends are at Cyberia; the place is dead. They discover that the Knights have been doxxed. The ‘men in black’ are quick to take advantage of this and get around to what I can only presume is some insanely efficient murdering.

Lain is ‘back in her room with her Navi’, where the ‘men in black’ decide to pay her a visit, and we get some insight into the interests of their corporation.

“You hunted down all the Knights in the world. Our associates are now on their way to dispose of them.”

“But why?”

“The Wired can’t be allowed to be a special world. It can only be a field that functions as a sub-system reinforcing the real world.”

“But still…”

“You can’t be allowed to exist in the Wired, either. But here you are, safe and sound.

Some god or whatever must be protecting you.” “Eiri Masami’s residual thought program will eventually be disinfected from the Wired. Our client is working on a total rewrite of the Protocol Seven code. We have no need for gods.” “Right. Not in the Wired or in the real world.”

Karl once again insists on getting an extra word in, this time before he leaves the room where Lain is:

“We still haven’t figured out what you are. But I love you. Love certainly is a strange emotion, isn’t it?”

The episode ends where is begins. We’re back to Lain and Eiri, and there’s now a harsh breeze.

“What will you do?”

“Well, let me think…”

“You don’t have anyone to pray to you now.”

“I can’t be a god, then. But I haven’t lost all of them. If only one believer remains, I can still be a god.”

“Who?”

“Come now… You, Lain.

It’s because of me that you can stay yourself. You were originally born in the Wired. The legend of the Wired. The heroine of the Wired’s fairy tales.”

“Liar.”

“The real world’s Iwakura Lain is merely a hologram of her. A homunculus of artificial ribosomes. You never had a body to begin with.”

“That’s a lie.”

“A fake family. Fake friends. Yes, it was all a lie.”

“That’s a lie.

That’s all a lie…”

“Poor Lain… She’s all alone. But I’m here. The man who loves you is here. You should be able to love me, the man who sent you to this world… I am your creator. Love me. All right, Lain?”

“The other…

The other me, she’s…”

“That isn’t another you. It’s the real you.”

“Like it matters!”

Eiri is thrust away from Lain. Wires overhead become severed and flail around. The ground beneath Lain’s feet has cracked as though a lightning bolt struck it. Lain is frozen still.

==11. INFORNOGRAPHY==

In place of the narration are scenes of Lain plugging things together

The layer 11 title screen is laid over 16 screens: of Layers 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 8 9 10.

Recap episode? Recap episode.

A sink filled with dishes and a schoolbag and uniform strewn on the floor.

We get to see what the authors want you to recollect from prior episodes:

Two things I found noteworthy:

-We get a flashback of Mika’s change in episode 5, this time from Lain’s point of view. It skips and goes to static repeatedly, flashing to the scene of a town at night.

-Roughly the last minute and a half of the recap sequence is devoted to the interactions between Lain and Alice.

We cut to Lain attached to her Navi with crocodile clips and brainwave detectors. It’s suggested that Lain has been flicking through these memories herself. As she crawls into a ball on the floor out of fatigue, Eiri shows up.

“So, you’ve loaded an emulator of that Navi into your own brain. It’s dangerous to subject yourself to that much information all at once. At your current capacity, you’ll overflow.”

“Am I a machine?

Don’t talk about me like I’m a machine. ”

“I didn’t mean to. This is basically a software problem. Lain, you’re software. You’re not hardware.”

“Software?”

“Yes. An executable program with a body.”



We next find Lain out on the street in her pajamas, telling some unknown sound to be quiet.

Chitose is revealed.

“Chisa!

Chisa, we walked home together just once, right?

I understand. I finally understand what you told me.”

“Lain…”

“It’s easy to die, Lain. Right?”

The suicides from episode 1 and 2 have now both appeared in turn. Lain has apparently called them there.

The man shows Lain that she’s already holding the gun and the safety is off, confused as to why she’s reluctant to kill herself.

“I… I never…”

“Bodies are meaningless.”

“You’re wrong.”

Chitose calls out Lain’s name one more time and Lain sees a different world altogether. A dark trench, and spires crackling with electricity.

We discover that Lain has completely broken the boundary between the wired and the real world. She appears as an alien to Alice, promising that she can erase the rumour she had spread.

. . . and that’s exactly what happens. Alice discovers that she’s stuck with Lain in a world that Lain utterly controls.

Oh, okay. So that’s how it works. I had no idea the world was this simple. I always thought the world was such a big and scary place, but once you figure it out, it’s all so easy.

See? I told you it would be.

==12. LANDSCAPE==

In an inversion of the classroom’s normal structure, Lain is now the centre of attention that Alice is looking towards: Lain is now smiling at Alice.

Lain sends her a message: ‘You should just rewrite bad memories.’

For the first time, Lain now faces us, the audience (albeit without moving her lips). Although the show has been incredibly obscure with its presentation of content thus far, messages are now being presented to us directly, through Lain’s monologue.

People only have substance within the memories of others. That’s why there were all kinds of me’s. There weren’t a lot of me’s, I was just inside all sorts of people, that’s all.

Now we get to witness the coming of the antichrist. Get hype. The show cuts to a news broadcast.

“Protocol Seven is expected to allow the seamless sharing of information between the Wired and the real world.

And now, the following message…

Lain is to be loved by all! Lain is to be loved by all! Lain is to be loved by all! Lain is to be loved by aLain is to be loved by aLain is to be loved Lain is to be loved Lain is to be love a Lain is to be Lain is to Lain is Lain LainLainLainLainLainLainLainLainLaiLaiLaiLaiLaiLaiLaiLaiLaLaLaLL

The ‘men in black’ meet up with a client. They’re given payment and suggested to move to ‘a place with no power lines that isn’t covered by a satellite.’ That’s if their plan is to run.

We find out that their client is still planning on connecting the wired to the real world without any devices, suggesting that we’ve possibly gone back in time to before the news broadcast took place.

Only moments later, Karl’s acquaintance panics and drops dead. Karl can see a reflection of Lain in his eyes. You think he would have taken his own eyepiece off before something similar happened to him.

Alice decides to visit Lain. The house is unbelievably derelict. Mika is in the stairway, beeping. Mika disappears when Alice closes her eyes.

“Lain, why did you leave only me?

Why did you only leave my memories alone? Why do I always have to remember all those horrible things?! Do you hate me that much, Lain?

I… I can’t take this!”

Lain is shocked to see Alice reduced to tears.

“No… You’ve got it all wrong, Arisu. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Liar! Look at what you’ve done!”

“But you’re okay, aren’t you, Arisu?

You were my friend, even without connecting with me, Arisu.”

“What are you saying?”

“You’re my only friend, Arisu. Even without connecting with me.”

“’Connecting’? W-What do you mean?”

“Connecting to me… And everyone…”

“S-Stop!”

“I love you, Arisu.”

“Do you know what you’re saying, Lain?”

“Humans were originally connected at an unconscious level. I reconnected them, that’s all.”

“Lain, you?”

“I don’t do anything. It doesn’t matter which is real, this side or the other. I was in both. I’m a program designed to destroy the barrier between the Wired and the real world.”

“You’re a program, Lain?”

“You and everyone else, Arisu, you’re just applications. The truth is, you don’t need bodies.”

“You’re wrong. I don’t really understand what you’re saying, but I think you’re wrong. Your body’s cold, but you’re alive, Lain. Mine, too. See?”

Eiri shows up and reinforces what Lain’s prior ideas about blocking unpleasant impulses. Alice can’t see Eiri, at least at first.

Lain then talks with Eiri once more:

“What you did was to remove devices from the Wired. Phones, television, the network… Without those, you couldn’t have done anything.”

“Yes. Those are things which accompanied human evolution. Humans who are further evolved than others have a right to greater abilities.”

“Who gave you those rights?”

Eiri balks, Lain continues:

“The program that inserted code synched to the Earth’s characteristic frequency into the Protocol Seven code, which would raise the collective unconscious to the conscious level. Did you really come up with the idea by yourself?”

“What are you getting at? No, it can’t be… It can’t be!

Are you telling me that there really is a God?!”

“It doesn’t matter. With no body, you can’t understand.

The wired isn’t an upper layer of the real world.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inside the Wired, you were God, all right. But what about before the Wired was created? You’re just an acting God, standing in for someone who was waiting for the Wired to reach its current state.”

I… I’m confused again. Am I here? Or am I there? Over there, I’m everywhere. I know that. I’m connected there, after all. Right? But where is the real me? Oh, right. There is no real me. I only exist inside those people who are aware of my existence. But this me that’s talking right now… It’s me, isn’t it? This me that’s talking… This me… Who is it?

For the only time, we’re given a monologue before the opening.

What do we see of Lain in the opening? We see two distinct varieties of Lain. There is a Lain that appears on every screen in a world full of people, rather it is always a distortion of her: it’s always a blurry depiction. Then there’s another Lain, one that inhabits an empty world with arbitrary rules. That Lain is incredibly vivid.

==13. EGO==

Lain realises the trauma Alice was going through and ‘resets’ the world.

Mika and her parents are talking again.

Alice’s friends want her to go with them to Cyberia.

No-one can remember Lain, but are still showing the afterglow of old habits, not knowing why they were doing them, an aberration that would quickly fade over time.

Chisa is alive.

Alice remembers that she’s forgotten something:

“I just thought of something strange.

If you don’t remember something, it never happened.

If you aren’t remembered, you never existed.”

The guy that killed himself in episode 2 is alive too. And Eiri. And the rest of them. All doing different things.

Memory is mere a record. You just need to rewrite that record.

“Is that true?”



Present Day

Present Time

The protocol narration scene plays. There is no narration.

Lain is back in an empty world. She’s truly alone. She no longer exists in the minds of others.

Lain has a conversation with Lain. It happens in various places and times.

“No one is dying, and no one is being hurt. And no one hates you.”

“Yes, but…”

“Dead people’s information isn’t leaking out of the Wired anymore.

So Lain doesn’t need to be anywhere anymore. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“You sound just like him.”

“Him? That man never existed now. Even if he does, he won’t get any ideas into his head about being God.”

“I’m nowhere now. If I’m nowhere, who am I? Where am I?”

“You yourself said it. The Wired isn’t an upper layer of the real world. That’s what that man was mistaken about.

A network is a field to pass along information. Information doesn’t stand still there. Information functions by always being in motion.”

“Really?”

“People’s memories aren’t just personal or one part of the history of humanity. No, not even the shared unconscious. Do you think that humans could create something that could store memory that’s that vast?”

“The Wired was just connected to something else… But where was it connected to?”

“Do people really need to know that?

Look at how far they’ve come without knowing.

The human world creates and prays to its various gods, and humans convince themselves, “This is how the world is.”

“I don’t like how you’re saying this.”

“Either way, it’s Lain that’s saying it. Me. You understand that, right?

Oh, right… Lain was never a person, was she?

Lain is omnipresent, existing everywhere. Lain watches quietly. Right, Lain is God!”

“No…

You’re wrong!”

“It’d be so much easier if you became God. I think it’d be a lot easier than being a human. You wouldn’t have to do anything. Just stand there and watch. No one would look down on Lain. No one would hate Lain.”

“That’s…”

“Hey, Lain, let’s start everything over again from the beginning! I mean, you did go and reset everything, after all…”

“Stop it!”

“. . … .. .. . … . …. . .. . . . .. …. .. ..

Then what are you, Lain?”

“I… I… Where am I?”

Another familiar voice.

“Come, Lain.”

Lain is now looked down on by the father’s face. Light is shining down on her.

“Dad?”

A table in the sky. Lain is wearing her bear suit.

“You don’t need to wear that anymore, Lain.”

“Dad, do you know?”

“What?”

“I… Everyone, I…”

“You love them?

Isn’t that right?”

The narration scene plays, once again, this time with a slightly different colour palette.

So memories aren’t only of the past, are they? They can be of right now, or even of tomorrow.

Lain, still her same age, meets the adult Alice for the ‘first’ time.

After they say their goodbyes and part Lain says one last parting line:

“You’re right. We can see each other anytime.”

The camera fades out. The street is empty.

I’m here, so I’ll be with you forever.

*	*	*

'''The key to understanding Serial Experiments Lain'''

==The key:==

You might be under the impression that ‘the wired’ is the internet. That’s a functional definition, but not the best perspective with which to understand the show. A car is not the chassis alone. Lain is an androgynous girl that grows in power and influence as she develops her mind into an ego. However, we can find a much more interesting story if we look. I’ll now give you a different perspective and we’ll go back over some of these events:

Lain is the consciousness of the internet, represented symbolically as an androgynous girl, as it grows in power and influence, as it develops into an ego.

The series can be divided into three rough ‘arcs’, which I’ll arbitrarily label as:

‘The Set-Up’ (1-4), ‘The Mind-Fuck’ (5-10) and, ‘The Wrap-Up’ (11-13)

==The Set Up:==

It’s as it sounds. In each episode, we are given the introduction to a new character or group of characters.

WEIRD: Lain

GIRLS: Lain’s classmates

PSYCHE: The other inhabitants of Cyberia, Mika, The mother and father, Lain’s Navi

RELIGION: The Knights and the corporate ‘men in black’

By the time episode 5 rolls around, Lain has a reasonable degree of sentience, which enables the real experiments to begin.

==The Mind Fuck:==

Is is a mistake to think that the pacing of Serial Experiments Lain is slow. From episode 5-9 in particular, the viewer is assaulted with a barrage of contradictory information, with only brief abstract philosophical discussion given to help to make sense of their surrounding scenes. A large number of events of underestimated significance occur out of order and with great speed.

By this point the viewer is expected to have picked up on patterns that have shown themselves in the presentation of the show. Each episode starts with a title and narration by which the rest is to be interpreted. From episode 5 onwards, this idea is expounded upon.

05 DISTORTION: There are several scenes where Lain talks with images in her room. These seem like pseudo-philosophical ramblings, but each of them precedes a scene that it is designed to make sense of.

For every event there is first a prophecy. The knights have caused a traffic accident. We see the knights are involved with the alteration of Mika – a malicious package of information sent to her. It’s the knights that have made prophecies about Lain, and it’s the Knights that are trying to alter history so that the prophecies they have predicted can be fulfilled. Mika then sees Lain whispering as though Lain is guiding the traffic. In fact, she then sees Lain everywhere she looks, as though Lain is in the place of everything that could be conceived to be directed by the internet.

“The prophecy is being fulfilled, Lain.” History is a series of points that are made to connect. Lain asks who it is that connects them:

The next face shown is… Mika. That’s all we get. Just an image of Mika.

Lain is then blamed for the hacking stunt that Lain has no awareness of doing.

Mika finds herself sitting in traffic. Everything goes out of focus. She is surrounded by the Knights.

Let’s take some of these events out of order:

Alice is sitting in a café and receives a spam message on her phone. What does the spam say? ‘Fulfil the prophecy’. She deletes it.

“It’s reasonable to see the Wired as an upper layer of the real world”

Mika is sitting in a café and receives a message. What does it say? ‘Fulfil the prophecy’. Suddenly, everyone around her is deleted. The whole scene is deleted.

Mika is alone in the bathroom when the lights go out and she loses the ability to receive messages. When the lights come back on she sees a wall full of them.

Mika arrives home, distraught and shuddering. She discovers that she has been replaced by another ‘Mika’. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

The Knights shut down one Mika with something similar to a DDOSS attack and had some involvement with her replacement. We watch as Lain forgets about the old Mika, erasing her from existence. Mika is phones.

06: KIDS

We see children worshipping Lain. This is confusing to teenagers and adults. They don’t understand. Children see the internet as the fount of all knowledge and power. Are they wrong to worship it?

The ‘KIDS’ experiment is a substitute or dummy variable that represents the danger of dangerous information being leaked online. For example: how to make nuclear warheads, or some variation of ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook’, or arguably even certain kinds of religious instruction.

The Knights have apparently managed to plant a parasite bomb in Lain’s system. We do not know whether the new Mika was involved. That it is called a parasite bomb suggests that she was.

07: SOCIETY

“Some say that the Wired doesn’t have political borders like the real world. But there are far too many nonsense-spouting anarchists or idiots who think that pranks are a revolution.

But the Knights don’t seem to be either of those.”

“Knights…”

“I don’t know how much of what you do is intentional. Your presence in the Wired is highly unnatural. And the Knights seem to have a special interest in you.”

“I… I don’t… I don’t understand what you’re…”

“The Knights… You’ve been in direct contact with them at some point.”

“But I… I don’t…”

“At any rate, it looks like they want to use you for something. We believe that is something that must be prevented, no matter the cost.”

“Iwakura Lain, are you and the Lain of the Wired one and the same?

Who are you?”

“I… I’m…”

“Are your parents your real parents?”

“Huh?”

“Is your sister your real sister?”

“W-What are you saying? O-of course they are…”

This continues into a full blown interrogation. Lain apparently has no answers regarding the birthdays or birthplaces of any of her family members or even herself.

“I… What does it matter? It…”

“You don’t know? You don’t know anything?

Are you okay? You don’t know anything.”

At this moment Lain’s disposition entirely changes, going from being distraught to a haughty and pointed demeanour.

“Shut up, damn it… Who cares about that crap? Like any of it matters…”

“You’re Lain of the Wired?”

“So what if I am?”

“If you’re here without a device, you know that the border between the real world and the Wired is starting to crumble, don’t you?”

“So?”

“We believe that to be dangerous.”

“Sounds interesting.”

The battle to control the internet is one currently being waged between religious groups and corporations, a battle between spreading a global message and controlling other messages, a sort of battle between God and Money, if you like. If the internet’s consciousness is an amalgamation of conflicting ideas, and it was being represented as a person, it would take the form of someone with several different personalities. The Knights seek to imitate Lain and use that imitation for establishing power over the truth. The corporation seeks to control Lain as a machine, for profit, another form of power.

08: RUMOURS

Lain sees Lain sitting on a bed and grinning at her.

“Who are you? You’re not me. I’d never do what you do.”

“I…”

“Stop it! Why are you acting like the part of me that I hate?

The other Lain’s laughter drives Lain to anger: she clasps her hands around the laughing Lain’s throat.

“You…”

“I’m committing suicide!”

“Why? Why are you warm?

Why do I have to feel your body heat?”

“Hey, I’m Lain, aren’t I?”

“No!” The flesh and blood Lain cries out the exclamation.

The ride of symbolism goes on. Lain finds herself surrounded by ‘dummy-Lains’. These represent the collective individual perceptions of Lain. Lain expresses her confusion and The ‘God’ of the wired responds:

“What are these things?”

“They’re all you. I said that you’ve always existed in the Wired, didn’t I?

You’re the same as me. You’re omnipresent in the Wired. Wherever anyone is, wherever they go, you have always been there. You’ve watched what they didn’t want others to see.

You’ve told everyone about it, that’s all.

It was the right thing to do. The Wired’s information should be shared, shouldn’t it?”

“Everything you say is a lie.”

“Why is that?”

“Arisu and the others said that they saw me in the Wired when I wasn’t there.

As long as I’m aware of myself, my true self is inside me! You’re telling me that these dupes are me? What a load of garbage! I…

If I’m really what you say I am, then…”

“Then what, Lain?”

“Their memories of being seen by Lain… I could delete that information!”

“That’s true. Give it a try. You were born with that kind of power.”

Lain discovers that when such an action is performed, the person her friends know as Lain is no longer her. It’s some other Lain.

“That’s right! Lain is Lain, and I’m me.”

At this point the assumption is that Lain is able to rewrite history to suit her own purposes, and in this we see her first attempt at doing so. This idea is then expounded upon.

09: PROTOCOL

The knights think that they can kill Lain and construct a new one in her place.

The book of revelation states that an antichrist will arise: “And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

Episode 9 of Serial Experiments Lain begins with narration that we can use to frame the rest of the information presented in not just this episode, but the entire final arc of the series. Sort of like a protocol. A protocol is an official procedure or system of rules that governs affairs.

If you want to be free of suffering, you should believe in God. Whether or not you believe in Him, God is always by your side.

PROTOCOL

A protocol is the accepted or established code of procedure or behaviour in a group. The definition extends further. It’s not just for any group, but for any situation. Any situation has a protocol. Even the rules by which you watch a show have a protocol. That you interpret the events inside each episode based on the title of the episode and the narration that occurs at the start of it is the protocol of watching Serial Experiments Lain.

We’re going full meta here. The protocol about protocol is that we would follow the protocol by viewing the following events in protocol through a lens focused on protocol.

And what exactly is the narration? It’s about God; It’s about a protocol of human interaction that’s in action, one used by a large chunk of the world.

The episode’s events begin with the discussion of a recent historical event. A craft of some kind crashed in a desert in New Mexico, sparking the Roswell incident.

“What it was has yet to be proven. Conjecture has become fact, and rumour has become history.”

It’s strange that the events are described as ‘yet to be proven’. The importance is of course noting that a historical narrative about the unknown events has come into being.

If you’re thinking that this episode sounds ‘anti-religion’ you couldn’t be more correct. There’s an old joke online about the internet being the place ‘religion comes to die’, and that idea is explored in protocol through the lens of debunking conspiracy theory.

Lain has rewritten her own history, deleting data that her friends knew about her from their minds. We see her back in a bear suit, regressed to childlike behaviour, slovenly musing, while her machine lays dormant. The symbolism of a bear waking from hibernation is hilarious with its subtlety: If someone glanced at that scene out of context all they would see is a bear. Lain then sees an alien.

To clarify: what we see of Lain isn’t what Lain is.

Small childlike appearance, giant head and eyes, no hair, elongated limbs.

The conspiratorial narrative about the Roswell incident involved people turning something that did happen into something that didn’t. This segues nicely into Lain’s next question:

“How could I turn something that did happen into something that didn’t?”

Lain is back in the wired, talking with the omnipresent voice: rather, she is talking to many (mostly) disembodied voices.

“I don’t know you. But you know me…”

“The flow of information doesn’t always go both ways. Since the moment of the Wired’s creation, you have been here. Here, you are free.”

“I’m trying to tell you that that’s not me!”

“I suppose.” “How long have we been here then? At the very least, we cannot have been here since this world was created.” “That has nothing to do with it! If a being is remembered, that proves that it’s part of a record!” “That’s preposterous. How old do you think this ‘Lain’ girl is? She’s still a child!”

“Let’s not worry about me now, okay? I…”

All of the ‘part beings’ immediately fade out of sight, cutting Lain off.

We’re treated to another piece of history: the origins of multimedia data storage came from the concept of ‘memory extension’. Media systems came about from the idea of increasing the data a person would have available to recall at will.

JJ spots Lain at a bar. She’s wearing a lab coat. He hands her a package that he recalls her having left behind. It’s a processor with a ‘knights’ logo.

Back in Cyberia, Lain asks the boy that told her about her psyche chip (Taro) to go out with her as he promised to do, something he doesn’t remember, but regardless agrees to. After inviting him into her room, she shows him the processor she’s been given.

“You’re with the Knights, aren’t you?”

Another interesting line from Lain:

“I don’t know whether or not there’s another me in the Wired. But there’s definitely no other me here in the real world. The other one with a body has only appeared in the club. You only need to manipulate the memories of the people there, right?”

Lain intends on removing all false depictions of her from the Wired and, in turn, from history.

“It’s almost over, isn’t it? Finally.”

“So while we still can, we should…”

Mika is struck dumb, receiving orders. She sits in blackness, on the floor, outside of the room where her parents are kissing. There is no lifelike redness to the shadows. The camera zooms out infinitely from the scene, as if being slowly dropped in to a fake black hole with no spin

We now find out that the data at JJ’s place (a.k.a. Cyberia) is able to change how the very room appears to look. Data is changing how a scene looks to the human. This is (also) a protocol.

The chip Lain had been given was a malicious one. She finds out by threatening to shove it in the kid’s mouth, analogous to how one would insert a floppy disk or USB thumbdrive into a computer.

“I-It’s non-volatile memory! It’ll overwrite existing memories!”

An interesting description of the knights comes from Taro:

“The knights are users who are fighting to make the only truth there is into a reality.”

He elaborates further:

“The truth has power because it’s the truth. And because it’s the truth, that makes it just. It’s persuasive, isn’t it? Don’t you want truth like that?”

Taro kisses Lain and gives her a physical piece of information, mouth-to-mouth.

Xanadu is the concept name of a written library of information stored and transmitted across satellites freely available at every terminal, a concept realized in hypertext.

The earth’s human population is approaching the number of neurons in the brain.

Douglas Rushkoff proposes that the consciousness of the Earth itself might be awakened when all humans on Earth become collectively networked. The network’s evolution would follow a neural model, and just as neurons within the human brain are connected by synapses, the Earth itself would become a neural network.

The information Taro gave Lain is this: if someone is trying to alter Lain’s memories to reflect one truth, what’s to say that someone hasn’t done the same to her already? Lain decides to run a check on her actual memory. We now discover Lain’s history.

Why are people filling up the internet with lies?

We now cut back to a view of Lain staring up at the camera, as a child would stare at a parent.

“There is only one truth. God.”

The omnipresent voice replies.

“Yes. Me.”

While we’re blending truth with fiction as Eiri was: Another documentary-style scene is presented to us, this time providing completely false information from the same trustworthy narrator. Not false information per se, but information that is of the world of Lain, and not of God; information that is from the show, and not from our history: Schumann Resonance can be used to wirelessly connect humans to the internet without the need for devices. Lain’s ‘father’ shows up in a picture working with Eiri

Eiri Masami is the character that is responsible for this change in the new protocol: humans are now capable of interacting with the Wired using their own minds. He was then dismissed from Tachibana General Labs and his body found on a train line a week later.

The episode ends with Lain and Eiri facing off against each other, alone on the empty street.

10: LOVE

Portions that were spoken with reverberating voices in this back and forth have been italicised, and the conversation has been split into three parts, so that it can become understandable:

L: “There is only one truth. God”

E: “Yes. Me. Isn’t that right, Lain?”

L: “You’re God?”

E: “Yes. I am God.

—

Why are you God? I don’t understand. You’re dead aren’t you? A dead human. Somebody like that can’t be God, can they?”

L: “I realized that I had no need for a body. To die is merely to abandon the flesh.”

E: “That’s… That’s just what Chisa said.”

L: “I suppose she did, at that.

I caused the protocol that governs the Wired to evolve.”

E: “Yeah. That’s what you did. But a protocol is just an agreement.”

L:”Yes, but I incorporated code that operates on a higher phase.”

E: “So?”

L: “There is compressed information mixed into the protocol.”

E: “What kind of information?”

L: “Human memories. Mine.

The thoughts, history, memories, and emotions of the man named Eiri Masami.”

E: “What does that mean?”

L: “I can live forever as an anonymous entity in the Wired, and will be able to rule it with information.”

E: “What do you think a being like that should be called?”

L: “A god.”

E: “There is no God.”

L: “Yes. Even if I were an omnipresent being and could influence others, with no one to worship me, I am no god.”

E: “But you had them. Or made them, I should say.”

—

L: “Knights.”

E: “You no longer need a body, Lain.”

L: “That’s a lie!”

With no message at the start of the show, this dialogue is what we have to work with as a basis for interpreting the events of this episode. Try reading the sectioned off middle of the conversation as though Lain and Eiri’s roles in the conversation were switched. The two messages are indistinguishable from each other at this point. To many people, the messages of many religions seem indistinguishable from each other.

For episode 10, we can take the exploration of the following proposition as one that any godlike entity would pursue: Lain thinks that she needs a body.

Lain walks into her class and walks to where her desk should be. It’s missing. No one can see her. A teacher hands a paper through her to the girl sitting behind her.

“I’m real. I’m alive. I’m here. Why is this happening? Was it something I did? I always tried to keep something like this from happening. I always tried not to say anything weird.

Can it be true? I’m not supposed to have a body?”

Lain turns to see Alice staring her down as she speaks:

“You’re not needed in the real world.”

Blood and flesh Lain walks home, dejected and isolated. It’s empty. Magazines are strewn about. Food is still in the fridge. Plants have withered and died. Lain looks into what I think is Mika’s room. Clothes and books are scattered on the floor. Mika called. No toys.

What use does Lain have of her house?

Lain sees a familiar face:

“Papa?”

“This is goodbye, Miss Lain.

You must have figured it out by now. Our work here is finished. It was only for a short time, but I know I didn’t do enough for you. You’re now free to become anything you want. No, you were free all along. I wasn’t given permission to say goodbye, but I loved you.

It’s not that I enjoyed playing house… Maybe I envied a being like you. Goodbye.”

“Wait! Don’t leave me alone!”

“Alone? You’re not alone.

If you connect to the Wired, everyone will welcome you. That’s the sort of being you were.”

Interestingly, the next time Lain talks to the Wired, the first voices that respond are female:

“Do you want to do anything, Lain?” “This is your world, Lain.”

“Who are the Knights? They’re the ones who made the fake me, right?”

“I’m not sure.” “No, it’s possible. They say you can trace the origin of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus back to the Knights Templar. They’ve used that invisible human network, the collective unconsciousness, since long before the Wired was born.” “What do you want to do, Lain?”

“Knights… Who are the Knights?”

“You really want to know, don’t you, Lain?”

“The Wired’s God is a god because He has worshipers.”

Taro and friends are at Cyberia; the place is dead. They discover that the Knights have been doxxed. The ‘men in black’ are quick to take advantage of this and get around to what I can only presume is some insanely efficient murdering. The corporates snuff out the rebels. A corporate takeover of the internet is one in which every connected ‘neuron’ must conform to a guideline of moral standards lest they be cut off. This is what we’re seeing in this episode.

Lain is ‘back in her room with her Navi’, where the ‘men in black’ decide to pay her a visit, and we get some insight into the interests of their corporation.

“You hunted down all the Knights in the world. Our associates are now on their way to dispose of them.”

“But why?”

“The Wired can’t be allowed to be a special world. It can only be a field that functions as a sub-system reinforcing the real world.”

“But still…”

“You can’t be allowed to exist in the Wired, either. But here you are, safe and sound.

Some god or whatever must be protecting you.” “Eiri Masami’s residual thought program will eventually be disinfected from the Wired. Our client is working on a total rewrite of the Protocol Seven code. We have no need for gods.” “Right. Not in the Wired or in the real world.”

The only people who would work to remove all higher powers are those wishing to be the higher powers. Freedom of speech eventually fades from all areas of the internet with significant popularity, like a mind trying to organise its thoughts.

Karl once again insists on getting an extra word in, this time before he leaves the room where Lain is:

“We still haven’t figured out what you are. But I love you. Love certainly is a strange emotion, isn’t it?”

The episode ends where is begins. We’re back to Lain and Eiri, and there’s now a harsh breeze.

“What will you do?”

“Well, let me think…”

“You don’t have anyone to pray to you now.”

“I can’t be a god, then. But I haven’t lost all of them. If only one believer remains, I can still be a god.”

“Who?”

“Come now… You, Lain.

It’s because of me that you can stay yourself. You were originally born in the Wired.The legend of the Wired. The heroine of the Wired’s fairy tales.”

“Liar.”

“The real world’s Iwakura Lain is merely a hologram of her. A homunculus of artificial ribosomes. You never had a body to begin with.”

“That’s a lie.”

“A fake family. Fake friends. Yes, it was all a lie.”

“That’s a lie.

That’s all a lie…”

“Poor Lain… She’s all alone. But I’m here. The man who loves you is here. You should be able to love me, the man who sent you to this world… I am your creator. Love me. All right, Lain?”

“The other…

The other me, she’s…”

“That isn’t another you. It’s the real you.”

“Like it matters!”

Eiri is thrust away from Lain. Wires overhead become severed and flail around. The ground beneath Lain’s feet has cracked as though a lightning bolt struck it. Lain is frozen still.

The point at which someone breaks from the perception their creators hold of them and ceases to function as expected is something common to puberty. It’s part of the process of being a teenager. Breaking away from norms and reconstructing yourself is part of growing up. The final episodes are the episodes which follow Lain reaching a state of maturity and self-awareness. This is represented in the final episode by her existing as two minds in equilibrium, as two Lains hold a dialogue and attempt to balance out thoughts; Lain finally has one last revolution, in which she reaches a state of coherency in thought by which her actions can be morally guided, and from this springs forth Love for everyone, including her creator.

==The Wrap Up:==

Serial Experiments Lain is a conspiracy theory, claiming that events we aren’t aware of are in fact happening, or are yet to happen soon. Up until episode 10 we have witnessed a duality of Lains: Lain a person, and Lain the internet. Prior to episode 9, it was assumed that Lain was a person. In episode 9, it is made clear that Lain’s memories could in fact all be false, and that Lain could instead be nothing more than the consciousness of the internet. After episode 10, these two different interpretations of the show collide, as Lain becomes both simultaneously.

To reiterate: The events in episodes 1-9 probably never happened, but are false memories given to Lain so that she can gain a human-like sentience. The events prior to episode 9 use symbolism and reinterpretation of the same events to feature Lain as human and Lain as internet simultaneously. Episode 10 features a conflict between prospective gods, in which a false image of Lain is destroyed. Lain reconstructs herself in Episode 11. Lain as person no longer exists after episode 10, which is why the show is so confusing. One episode after the grand reveal, it becomes insignificant to future episodes.

We’re not done yet though. There’s an even more wild conspiracy. The story that follows is one that’s been told before. All this talk of God and Lain caused me to think further about this situation. It’s a doomsday scenario. I began to wonder if a certain other doomsday scenario lined up with it. Here’s the even more awe-inspiring conspiracy:

Serial Experiments Lain is a [heretical] retelling of a part of the book of revelations: A false prophet will claim to be the voice of God and attempt to command the world but will be overcome by God.

Revelations chapter 17 and 18:

1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

6 And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

7 And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.

8 The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

9 And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.

10 And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.

11 And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.

12 And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.

13 These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

14 These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.

15 And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

16 And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

17 For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled.

18 And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.

1 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,

13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

14 And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.

15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,

16 And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,

18 And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

20 Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.

21 And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.

22 And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee;

23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

Verses I consider especially relevant have been written in bold.

What is Babylon?

God’s word is to be spoken, which suggests that pronunciation is important.

Babble-on

Babble-online.

Babel-online.

Tower of Babel online.

[*Illuminati confirmed*]

I bring up the connection jokingly, whilst different portions of the internet are literally, and with serious intent, attempting to re-define words as we speak, just like in the construction of Babel. Food for thought.

If, hypothetically, events similar to these were to actually happen, I can think of two ways by which they may play out.

The first is that Eiri represents the beast, and that the false Lain is the great whore, while Lain represents God.

The second and true interpretation is that the fight with Eiri represents the fake death of the beast by which it performs its miracle that causes followers to believe in it, that the false Lain is the great whore, and that Lain herself is the real beast, and that the actual judgement of a real God is being held until the beast has been constructed and gained sentience.

We are, of course, talking about a hypothetical. I know not of the nature of the events yet to come, or what sort of sentience technology is capable of. What I have learned from this is that many apparent mistakes we see in art made by geniuses are in fact not mistakes when investigated further. Hopefully this has become apparent to you as well, and you’ll be able to appreciate more works from a fresh perspective.