Explaining Iwakura Lain

Serial Experiments Lain is a series reputed far and wide for being confusing, slow and just generally hard to make sense of. The most ambiguous aspect of the entire thing is the topic of Lain herself, and the struggle of trying to ascertain the nature of her existence. However it’s a series that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and theorising about, and I personally think at this point I’ve got a pretty good understanding of its deeper workings.  The question of Lain’s identity is not something I can provide a substantial answer to in a succinct matter of minutes. Before I can even begin to talk about what I think Lain actually is, there’s a whole myriad of contexts I first have to bring to attention. To try and make an educated estimate on her identity, you must first pull into consideration the key factors of the Knights, Deus, Protocol 7, and the Collective Unconscious, and then weigh them all against each other in order to reach your own interpretation.

The Knights of the Eastern Calculus are one of the main factions in the series vying for control of Lain’s growth. They are, in essence, a secret society existing within the Wired that worship their god Deus. Their sole purpose was to make their ‘one truth’ a reality, with the truth in question being the will of their god. The goal that Deus and the Knights were trying to reach required Lain to abandon her physical flesh and assimilate into the Wired, and for that purpose they are constantly taking action to try and break down her mental state in hopes that she’ll simply give up on the real world and seek solace in the digital abyss.

One of the primary locations in Lain’s world is a night club called Cyberia that is often the site of events for the Wired manifesting in real life. Lain’s first appearance there occurs at the start of episode 2 when Arisu and her group of friends believe they spot her, yet when they query her about it she seems clueless.

This is because who they encountered was actually a replica of Lain’s online persona. Unbeknownst to the majority of its congregation, Cyberia was actually somewhat of a testing ground for the Knights and served as a key point where the Wired and real life intersected. One of the regular club-goers was a boy named Taro, and it later comes out that he was a provisional member of the Knights tasked with altering the memories of everyone who entered Cyberia. That’s why Arisu and her friends were able to encounter Lain of the Wired there without Lain being aware of it – Taro had been under instructions from the Knights to make everyone there think they had encountered Lain of the Wired. This was done to cause turmoil within Lain’s psyche and make her start questioning whether she was really the only Lain, with the hope that by losing her boundary of self she would turn to the Wired where everyone was connected.

When Lain later physically goes to Cyberia, the club members draw attention to the opposites in her personality. This confuses her as this was her first time there, but she was unaware that the people there were already familiar with the Lain that Taro had been showing them. However, when faced with the threat of the gunman Lain freezes, and her Wired persona comes out as a defence mechanism.

The gunman is under the influence of a newly developed technological drug called Accela, which is secretly a mind control/memory rewriting device produced by the Knights as the first phase of them testing the limits of how far they could extend their digital control in the real world. In a move to protect herself and her accomplices, Lain exerts her power over its technological frequencies to make the man kill himself – an incident which makes a profound impact on her mental well-being.

The Knights are a constant source of harassment for Lain as they attempt to steer her to their own ends

They were the ones who sent Lain the Psyche chip in episode 3 that allows Lain to temporarily let her consciousness engage with the Wired directly, and again later they were the ones who tried to get Lain to install the non-volatile memory chip which would have rewritten her memories and put her under their control, although that time Lain catches onto their schemes and confronts Taro for being one of their members.

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They’re directly responsible for interfering with Lain’s family when they target her sister Mika and reprogram her mind to reduce her to a completely non-functioning state. In episode 5 Mika receives a tissue pack from a man at the Shibuya intersection who we can assume was secretly a member of the Knights in disguise. Immediately following this, Taro (who is also of the Knights) spills his drink on her, forcing her to open the tissues she received to wipe her sleeve dry. However, upon opening them she discovers that they have a haunting message inscribed into them that causes her to see a vision of the Knights’ logo casting a giant shadow upon her. Following this, she starts to lose her perception of time, shown by her unconsciously losing entire hours in the restaurant she was at, and she begins losing track of her identity visualised by her seeing another version of herself in her own home, eventually having her consciousness lost and replaced by a shamble of her former self that can only mumble computational gibberish. The events up until she sees the Knights emblem happen in reality, but after witnessing this it’s my belief that her consciousness is essentially ejected and her physical body taken over by the one the Knights have written in. This is not without precedent as the Knights had already displayed their ability to rewrite memories and identities utilising things like Accela and the non-volatile memory chip. The overtaken physical body returns home, whereas the loose consciousness begins tripping out. Mika had not realised she had been ejected at that point, and so she eventually returns home and this is when Lain witnesses her standing in the doorway as one of the digital ghosts that she had been seeing all over. The rewritten Mika then serves as a sentinel for the Knights within the Iwakura household, relaying information as well as being the one that plants the bomb in Lain’s coolant system. This psychological damage to someone she cares about causes an adverse reaction within Lain’s emotional state.

With them explained, I can now move on to talk about the most central figure within the Knights hierarchy, the object of their worship – Deus.

Throughout the series there is constant talk of a deity residing in the Wired, right from episode 1 where Lain asks Chisa why she committed suicide and she simply responds “God is here.” The being spoken of in her words is Deus, the scattered god of the Wired, whose true identity is Masami Eiri – the progenitor of Protocol 7 and the man who alleges to have created Lain.

Although he doesn’t explicitly show up until the ending run of episodes, Eiri pops up early in the show. Eiri first appears as a disembodied voice in episode 3, talking to Lain while she was riding the train. He contacts her again in the first part of episode 5, and when she responds to his voice by questioning his identity, he introduces himself as god.

Prior to the start of the series, Eiri was employed at the Tachibana General Labs, a computer company working on a project to update the Wired to a newly designed framework titled Protocol 7. However, it was eventually discovered by the company that he had secretly written in code to give himself full permissions over its functioning, and embedded a digital snapshot of his consciousness into it. It is through this that even after his timely suicide he is able to continue roaming the Wired as Deus. Although it is worth mentioning that Eiri isn’t the only human to have uploaded his consciousness to the Wired, as Chisa was shown to have done the exact same thing in the first episode. The difference though is that Chisa was one of his worshippers like the Knights, she herself wasn’t attempting to become god like Eiri was but rather to get closer to him while also serving as an example to try and push Lain towards doing the same. Lain herself also uploads her consciousness directly to the Wired with the Psyche processor, although the specifics are different for her since unlike the others she maintains her body to anchor herself in the real world.

What Deus was trying to accomplish through Lain was to break down the border between the physical world and the digital network, and instantaneously reconnect all of humankind without the need for some kind of a device as the terminal. He wanted to use Protocol 7 to close the world and open the next.  In order for his plan to come to fruition he needed Lain to commit suicide and set her soul within the Wired like he had done so that with her under the spell of his words he could then gain control over her memory-changing powers and use them to rewrite reality.

At one point, Eiri makes the remark that Lain’s true self resides in the Wired and that her body is merely a hologram of this. I believe there is a modicum of truth to this. I’ll talk about it more once I get to Lain herself, but in short Lain existed as a consciousness without form until Eiri caught her frequency within the Wired and gave her a body.  As a disembodied consciousness, it stands to reason that Lain shouldn’t normally be able to manifest herself in the physical world, yet she is in possession of a body that is undeniably human, she even bleeds when Arisu accidentally strikes her out of fear. This phenomenon is attributed to a structural component in the Wired called Protocol 7.

Protocol 7 is Eiri’s handiwork inspired by the previous research of a scientist by the name of Dr Schuman, a theory put forth about the collective unconscious by Dr Roshkoff, and a similar prior project created by Professor Hodgeson dubbed the KID System.

Dr Schuman made the observation that the Earth itself was constantly humming, emitting a frequency at a level below the range of human hearing that would come to be known as the Schuman Frequency. Likening the frequency to Earth’s brain waves, Dr Roshkoff noted that the number of humans alive on the Earth were nearing the amount of neurons in the brain, and he then put out the theory that perhaps once humans did reach that same level of proliferation the consciousness of the Earth itself would be roused and the collective unconscious would rise as a sort of organic neural communication network between individuals.

Moving on to Hodgeson and the KID System then, at its core, the KID System (otherwise known as KIDS) was an experiment attempting to restore the lost collective unconscious by harnessing an innate energy from children. Having accepted the works of his predecessor Roshkoff, Dr Hodgeson designed his Kensington Experiment to try and brute-force the collective unconscious into reawakening. The KID system was named so because it was using latent psi energy as a power source which was stated to be more potent in children than in adults, with the idea that adults had grown too evolutionarily stagnant from their time in society, whereas the kids were still innocent and connected to one another. The plan was that by channelling a large amount of psi energy through devices called Outer Receptors it would become possible to use that energy to manifest phenomena in conscious reality.  Subsequently, this focus on children explains why the kids in Shibuya were all raising their arms in praise towards the Lain in the sky before she had even appeared. Unlike the older teenagers and adults who had to explicitly see her, the children were able to innately sense her upcoming presence due to the connection between their own psi energy and the psi powering Protocol 7.

However, Hodgeson’s experiment was a failure and resulted in a catastrophic explosion of energy that took the lives of all the children involved. Because of this, his funding was lost and his research abandoned.

Many years later Eiri begun his work on Protocol 7, and with his vision he built upon the past failures of these three scientists. He was inspired by Roshkoff’s idea of the planetary consciousness, and to this effect he encoded the Schuman frequency into his protocol with the intention that the Wired’s frequency would resonate with the planet’s innate frequency and somehow restore the collective unconscious.

Noting how much of an importance is placed on frequencies, it’s my belief that the show’s constant use of ambient humming is meant to not just be a brilliant method of establishing atmosphere, but to also act as a subtle way to reinforce the idea that the Wired is resonating with the Earth’s frequency. It’s a creative styling that also weaves this non-verbal narrative that helps clue you into some of the more obscure mechanics of the show.

Alongside that, Eiri also spurred the Knights into adapting a new version of the KID System as a source of psi energy. Unlike KIDS which harnessed it from a specific group of children in a lab, Protocol 7 was harnessing psi from a larger pool of children through the network game of tag that the Knights had designed and that Lain had been investigating. Protocol 7 allowed for digital entities of substantial power (namely Lain and Eiri) to manifest in real life by situating themselves within the collective unconscious. For the majority of the series, Lain is the only being given physical form via the protocol, with the appearances of characters like Chisa and Eiri instead happening inside Lain’s specific perception of reality. This is revealed in episode 12 when Lain is talking to an image of Eiri while Arisu is unable to see or hear him until he himself attempts to manifest a body through Protocol 7 like Lain has.

At one point Lain makes the remark that “people only have substance within the memories of other people”, and this sentiment is the key to understanding how Protocol 7 actually functions.

During Lain and Eiri’s big confrontation, Lain states that Protocol 7 was “synched to the Earth’s natural frequency in order to raise the collective unconscious to the conscious level.” Breaking this down, what this is means is that they as digital entities were manipulating the way that mankind perceives reality in order to write themselves into physical existence. It completely blurred the lines between real and digital, treating reality itself like a virtual space for its code to be altered and rewritten.

And with that knowledge of Deus and Protocol 7  in mind, I can finally move on to begin discussing Lain.

Beginning the show as a mere schoolgirl totally ignorant of technology and the Wired world, after Lain is introduced to it she shows an unnatural affinity towards it as she rapidly adapts to the point that in only 4 episodes she has already gone so far as to utilise the highly illegal Psyche chip in order to connect her consciousness itself directly to the Wired. Her room that had initially been an empty space is turned into a technological nest in a flash, with wires and computer screens strung all over and even the floor flooded with coolant for the sake of keeping her Navi healthy.

However, I do believe that right from the beginning Lain had a raw, inherent connection to the Wired. As early as episode 1, Lain is hearing the disembodied voices of the dead amidst the humming of the electrical power lines, and when she tells them to stop it is made clear by the confusion of everyone else in the silent train carriage that what she was hearing wasn’t something in her physical proximity. It is my belief that Lain who was originally some kind of godlike being had done her best to seal away her own memory when Eiri created a body for her to inhabit, which is why she believes that she needs to utilise all these different machines in order to use her true potential. The reason she had attempted to forget about her powers was because she wanted to live like a normal human would. Admittedly though I find the procession of events in episode 1 is the hardest to pin down in the entire scenario. The only suspicions I can raise is that perhaps episode 1 takes place very soon after Lain was given human form and that scenes like her teleporting around seemingly struggling to keep herself rooted in one place, being unable to read the language, and having her formless essence escape her body as smoke (this is given credence by the fact the bgm playing during the fingertips scene is called ‘Ectoplasm’ on the BOOTLEG soundtrack) represent her struggles acclimating to the human condition while still maintaining awareness of her true nature – leading her to seal her own memories soon after in the hope that it will help her maintain humanity more effectively. I believe that the moment she seals her memories is at the start of episode 3 after causing the gunman to commit suicide, where she has a brief memory lapse when meeting with Arisu.

For our protagonist, there are two personalities of Lain acting. Firstly, we have her personality as Iwakura Lain. In real life she is a meek girl that struggles with her shyness and social anxiety, but when she logs onto the Wired a second personality comes out – Lain of the Wired. In stark contrast to her real life demeanour, Lain of the Wired is confident, impatient and aggressively outspoken. Unlike Anti Lain, these two are explicitly shown to inhabit the same body when Lain manifests her Wired personality as a defence mechanism in real life; seen in episode 2 when she compels the man under the influence of Accela to commit suicide, and later against the psychological probings of the Tachibana Labs president. Likewise, when she tracks down Professor Hodgeson in the Wired and begins interrogating him on the nature of KIDS there are moments when her offline personality starts showing through as a response to her genuine distraught for the safety of the children involved.

However, there are scenes in the show where Lain appears and does things that simply don’t make sense as actions that Lain Iwakura or Lain of the Wired would take. And this is due to the existence of a third personality that pops up during the series: Anti Lain.

Anti-Lain is its own individual entity separate from Iwakura Lain, instead being an avatar created by the Knights in an attempt to recreate Lain of the Wired and facilitate Protocol 7’s destruction of the border between reality and virtual reality. The Knights viewed Lain as their prophetical saviour that would come and enact their wishes, so when it became clear that Lain wasn’t going to listen to their desires they took matters into their own hands by constructing their own version of the Lain program.

Initially the Knights sought out Lain on the Wired and ingratiated themselves with her, treating her with an unprecedented niceness that Lain took as merely an act of companionship, when in truth they were gathering information from her and conducting analyses in order to aid the development of their own Lain program. The purpose of Anti-Lain was like everything else they had done, to try and pollute Lain’s sense of self and make her start losing touch with reality – something that Anti-Lain proves very successful at doing. One of the most central things Anti-Lain does is expose Arisu’s hidden relationship with her teacher, an act that turns the entire school and even Arisu against Lain. As a response to all this negative pressure, there is a moment where Lain temporarily loses her composure and lets her reality-warping powers run berserk, completely obliterating the school’s storeshed in the process.

Anti-Lain existing as a separate body explains some notable inconsistencies in Lain’s life, such as when she hacks the TV screens in Shibuya and appears as the prophet that catalyses Mika’s mental collapse, or when she eliminates the Men in Black  and the man trying to reach the Knights. One of her most prominent appearances is when the giant naked Lain appears in the skies over Shibuya, an event that completely surprises Lain Iwakura. This heavenly projection of Lain is the Knights testing the limits of Protocol 7 and the abilities of their newly created vanguard Anti-Lain.

Thematically, Anti-Lain represents all the parts of Lain that she herself hates. On a very basic level the three Lains represent the Freudian idea of the Id, Ego and Superego. Lain of the Wired is an aggressively self-righteous superego that is attempting to pursue justice and protect humanity from Deus and the Knights even if she has to do questionable things to achieve this, Anti-Lain is the Id that doesn’t care who it hurts in the process of fulfilling its own desires, and Iwakura Lain is the ego that mediates between the two. The Knights’ copy of Lain represents an unhinged digital deity that has no regard for humanity in the way that it manipulates and murders for its own profit with no remorse. After Lain learns of her family’s surrogacy and some of the more questionable circumstances behind her own existence, she herself becomes unrestrained. Losing her family makes her feel as if she has lost the last thing tying to her to humanity, and in response she lets go of herself. The exact moment at which Lain awakens to Protocol 7 and melds reality and the network is midway into episode 11 where (after conversing with digital echoes of Chisa and the gunman) she sees these grotesque electronic towers looming on the horizon, presenting the visual of technology encroaching upon the physical plane. The empty, cybernetic world she finds herself residing in shortly after is meant to represent that she has torn the boundary between the real and the virtual, and I also believe this is what she is referring to when she tells Alice that she’s “already broken the border”. Acting upon her inner selfishness, she incites violence by using her powers to leak the identities of the Knights, putting them up as prime targets for assassination by the Men in Black. Following this, she goes to Arisu and promises to rewrite everyone’s memories to make it seem as though the peeping scandal had never happened so that they can be friends again.  This is an example of Lain entirely abusing her power for her own gain, the same way that Anti Lain did. Furthermore, it is for this reason that at the end of episode 11, Lain gives off the same unnatural smile as Anti Lain.

I want to digress briefly and discuss the significance behind Lain’s head being attached to the alien body in her meeting with Arisu, which is as follows: in Serial Experiments Lain there is a recurring message about possession of a body being something that helps identify someone as human. Eiri and the Knights are constantly trying to persuade Lain to abandon her body, whereas Lain herself is always trying to ignore them and retain her human heart.

For Lain’s body in this scene to have been replaced by an alien, that is, replaced by something completely inhuman, it symbolises that what she is about to do by manipulating memories and erasing past events is something that goes against the human heart that she had tried so hard to hold onto. It also draws a direct parallel to earlier in the series when Anti Lain had appeared in that same form, making the notion that Lain is now acting no different than the side of her that she said she hated.

It’s interesting to note that the self-serving way Lain was acting in this state seems to be similar to the little of her personality in the Playstation 1 game that I could glean from the cutscenes. Although it needs to be acknowledged that despite some loose similarities in the progression of events and the focus on Lain’s deteriorating mental health, the PS1 game is an entirely different universe where Deus, the Knights and Protocol 7 don’t exist and therefore the nature of her existence is fundamentally different.   Edit: I was a dumb dumb and wrote this before actually finding a way to read the game’s script – The Knights are mentioned once or twice, Protocol 7 exactly once, and Deus appears in the Nightmare of Fabrication. Additionally her psychiatrist (the other main character) works for Tachibana. Her existence in the PS1 game is actually the same as in the TV show imo, it’s just told even more obscurely since the game is more of an addendum to the TV series and presumes you’re familiar with that first.

Returning to where I was before then, ultimately, Anti Lain represents the raw, animalistic self-absorption that Lain has to overcome. It’s made abundantly clear that Iwakura Lain values her humanity over all else. Many of her greatest grievances come from the moments when she has to wrestle with the fact that she isn’t a regular human. For example, when Eiri tells her to abandon her body and become a god in the Wired, it places an incredible strain of anxiety and confusion upon Lain’s mind. And when the Tachibana Labs president reveals to her that her family isn’t actually related to her at all (an act which starts showing the falsities in her human identity), it upsets her to tears. However, when she starts to abuse her power to rewrite the memories of her peers this can be seen as an act of her falling to Eiri’s wishes and losing her human heart, and in the following episode you see Lain starting to act on her powers with only her selfish, inhumane desires in mind.

I also think it worth mentioning that I’ve seen exactly one person suggest the existence of a fourth Lain that they referred to as ‘goddess Lain’ or ‘the Lain in blue’. Going off that description there’s only one instance I can think they might be talking about. All of the Lains tend to have a defining feature that separates them from the other incarnations – Iwakura Lain has a body and social anxiety, Lain of the Wired has a near-constant scowl and imposing confidence, and Anti-Lain has that unnerving smile. I think the only possible spot left for another Lain would be the apparition of Lain in the coloured sundress that appears near the end. Personally I think that dress looks more of a turquoise but I can see how it might be taken as blue. However, I’ve always interpreted it to be that the sundress Lain is just a representation of Lain’s subconscious desires and not necessarily a unique personality like the other three.

In any case, with that knowledge of Deus, his Protocol 7 and the three Lain personalities now in mind, we can finally move on to tackle the most central and ambiguous question in the entirety of Serial Experiments Lain – what is Lain? Throughout the course of the series it doesn’t take long to realise that Lain is some kind of alternate existence to humanity, but it’s hard to determine what exactly she is without delving into it.

Eiri asserts that he was the one who created Lain, but this is shown to be a misguided opinion on his part. He and his followers acknowledge that Lain was a being that existed in some form since the very beginning of the Wired, and his claim is that since he was the one who created Protocol 7 and gave her a physical form, he is her creator. Though it’s up for debate whether Eiri ever truly believed he was her creator, or whether this notion was simply part of his grand scheme to destabilise Lain and make her listen to him but personally I think the latter is more likely. However I do believe that Eiri was genuinely mistaken about the nature of her existence, honestly thinking that she was something that only came into being alongside the birth of the Wired rather than something that predates it. When Eiri confronts her with these words in episode 12, Lain firmly rejects this. She shoots a rhetorical question at Eiri, mockingly questioning him on whether Protocol 7 was actually his idea or whether there was a true higher power that was simply manipulating him and waiting for the Wired to reach a suitable state of evolution before revealing itself. She never explicitly says it was her, but I think it’s very clear that we as an audience are supposed to recognise that she is speaking of herself. Additionally I believe that the scene at the start of episode 10 where Lain and Eiri seemingly switch bodies for the duration of their discussion is supposed to be symbolic of this, as it presents the visual of Eiri being the prophet and Lain being the god that directed him rather than the opposite. So if we are to go off of this, it makes it sound as though Eiri was the “acting god” and Lain was a true god who predates the existence of the Wired.

I will remind you that in this series it has been established that the type of god it deals with is not necessarily the creator of all life but a transcendent being of near limitless power and infinite presence; a higher existence without beginning or end. So with that in mind, if we take Lain’s words as the final truth of the show and decide that Lain is in fact a god under these definitions, then we can finally begin to zero in on what exactly she is.

Previously I had thrown around the idea that Lain was the avatar of the Wired, or maybe even that she was the Wired itself. But she clearly implies that she existed even before the Wired did so this can’t be possible. I had also entertained the thought that perhaps she was simply wrong and Eiri did in fact create her, but this is blatantly inconsistent too because even Eiri himself acknowledges that Lain was an already existing conceptual being until he gave her a body, it’s just that he incorrectly labelled this an act of creating her whereas Lain says she had influenced him to do it in the first place. Perhaps she was something akin to a real-world religious god in the sense that she was an unknown being without form that completely exceeds the realm of humanity and Earth, but I think having her simply be a generic higher existence with no relation to humankind like that doesn’t line up with the show’s meticulously planned out themes and plotlines. It doesn’t make sense for her to be an external god in heaven, instead she has to be something born of Earth like the humans are. It’s also for this same reason that I don’t think it’s possible for her to have alien origins. At one point I was in consideration that instead of using Protocol 7 Lain actually was Protocol 7, but this can’t be the case due to the fact that Eiri’s digital consciousness forces his way into reality in episode 12 and that simply wouldn’t be a possible avenue if the protocol was contained inside of Lain. And so with everything the story has presented to me in consideration, I’ve arrived at my own conclusion that there’s really only one viable answer left:

By process of elimination, my answer is that Lain is the will of the planet itself. She is the embodiment of the Earth’s consciousness and humanity’s collective unconscious theorised about by Dr Roshkoff. Keep in mind that these two things are actually one in the same since according to Roshkoff’s theory the collective unconscious came about as a result of humans being linked into Earth’s larger consciousness. I believe this makes a lot of sense thematically as well since when you really get into it everything that happens in Serial Experiments Lain with Protocol 7 happens as a result of this idea of the collective unconscious and the concept of connecting humans. For Lain to be the collective unconscious itself essentially makes her a deity that represents connection between all of humankind, which is in line with the message of the show.

Indeed as Eiri and the Knights had told her, she existed as an unanchored will floating around the planet until Protocol 7 resonated with her frequency to bring her into conscious reality and build a body for her. But her words when refuting Eiri are also true in that she was the one who planted the idea of Protocol 7 inside his head in the first place; that she was as a true goddess watching over the world until the Wired was sufficiently developed as a two-way communication medium to the point that she could utilise it to walk amongst humanity.

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Returning to the previously mentioned explanation of Protocol 7 that Lain gives, we can now extract new perspectives on it based on this classification. For Lain to be the spirit of Earth, it explains a plot point throughout the series where it repeatedly draws attention to the fact that Lain is able to manifest herself in the Wired in a more complete form than anyone else. If we work under the assumption of my interpretation, this would then come from the fact that (as the avatar of Earth) the Wired’s Protocol 7 framework was specifically synchronised to Lain’s natural frequency. So in that way the Wired operating on Eiri’s 7^th generation protocol would have been something that was just as real and malleable to Lain as reality was. It also provides us with the view that “raising the collective unconscious to the conscious level” specifically refers to the act of taking the formless collective unconscious and placing it in the body that would later become known as Lain so that she could navigate and engage with conscious reality.

The end goal of Deus and the Knights is to get Lain to abandon her body and move her soul to the Wired. However, the only reason Lain has a body in the first place is because her formless consciousness was caught in the net of Protocol 7 which is part of the Wired. As Eiri has said, her body is a hologram, and her true self is in the Wired – interpreted to mean that her body is just a false homunculus and her consciousness lies elsewhere. Why do they need her to abandon her body if she technically already resides in the Wired then? What’s the point of this loop back? I believe the key to this is in Eiri’s claim that he was the one who gave Lain ego. Running off the story that Lain was originally a loose consciousness emanating from the Earth, then she would have been completely unanchored as a jumble of unrefined, unconscious feelings and desires without the capability for recognition of self or conscious thought. I believe that by placing her inside a body and letting her live like a human she would have started to develop a sense of identity and the capacity to use her perception-altering powers at will. In order for Deus to achieve his goals he needed to utilise Lain’s powers. He wanted to have Lain first become self-aware, and then pressure her into undergoing ego death and suicide, so that she would return to the Wired as an empty shell which he could effectively use as a control terminal to take over the collective unconscious and rewrite reality/perception. This would require him to take control of Lain’s psyche, an act which would only be possible if she first had the potential for sapient thought.

Moving on to the next point then, why did she choose to manipulate Eiri so that she could manifest a body? Because as she told her father, Lain loved humans. More than anything. And I believe that if you reflect on everything that happens in the show, you can discern that Lain also wants that love to be returned. Observing her actions through the series, for the most part Lain just wanted to have a human connection to others and for those people to be happy.

• She wanted to be together with her family and was heartbroken when that was taken away from her.
• After she overhears about the possible correlation between the deep-web deathgame Phantoma and the murders of children that had been occurring, she immediately begins tracing through rumours on the Wired because she wanted to protect the children who were being mistakenly killed, and she was visibly saddened when she was unable to save them.
• Later still she wanted to keep Arisu safe from the rumours surrounding her and was extremely distressed when she was unable to.

Unfortunately the world was cruel to her, giving her a life of nothing but suffering and difficulty, which causes her morality to waver near the end, but at the core of all her actions was her intent to protect the humans she so held dear.

You don’t find out until near the end, but Lain’s family consists of surrogates put in place by the Tachibana Company, given instructions to regulate her growth and keep her from using her godlike potential to break the borders between worlds as this is something they deemed dangerous. Or at least that’s the motive that the Men in Black were fed. In truth that was false information, as the Tachibana president was later revealed to have been working directly with Eiri to hasten Lain’s awakening. I’m unclear on whether her family was clued into the true motives (the fact that Tachibana worked for Deus) or not, but from the way her parents treated her relationship with the Wired and the things they said towards the end it seems as though they were aware of it. It’s also worth noting that episode 9 shows Yasuo working alongside Eiri to develop Protocol 7, so it makes sense that he would also be aware of Lain’s true capacity and the link between Tachibana & Deus.

Although in a cruel twist of fate Eiri’s machinations had ultimately worked against him. His one purpose was to get Lain’s powers into the Wired to channel the collective unconscious, but when he starts to suspect the existence of a true higher power in episode 12, Lain tells him “it doesn’t matter, without a body you can’t understand” revealing to him that since he had discarded his natural, physical body for a digital and intangible projection, he was no longer linked into Earth’s collective unconscious. Yet again reinforcing the show’s repeated message that the body is a special temple that lets you retain your humanity. By selfishly trying to take control of reality with his own hands he had been disconnected from mankind’s network.

Eiri and the Tachibana president had orchestrated the entire events of the show, all the way from Lain causing the gunman to commit suicide at the start, to sending her the Psyche chip and making her engage with the Wired more, even up to the assassination of the Knights near the finale. These events were all done with the intention to try and force Lain to abandon her body and choose to break the borders with Protocol 7. The tipping point where Lain begins to pursue this goal is in episode 8 when Eiri and Anti-Lain run a simulation to show Lain  what it could be like if she rewrote everyone’s memories of Arisu’s scandal. This simulation serves as motivation for her to try and break the border between the worlds. This is what Lain is referring to when she tells Arisu “I’ll make it so it never happened. I’ve been working really hard to be able to do that.” And so by all means the way Lain was acting in episode 11 and 12 is the culmination of all their efforts, it is Lain starting to fulfil the prophecy they had laid out for her.

But what they couldn’t have accounted for was the genuine friendship that Lain shared with Arisu. In a world throttling towards complete domination by technological communication, Arisu represents the human touch. She was the one person who displayed any interest in Lain before Lain used the Wired to connect to them; she was Lain’s one true friend. In this way, Arisu served as a grounding influence for Lain that helped her to remember the humanity inside her soul. At the start of episode 13 while Arisu is still recoiling in fear from seeing Eiri grotesquely attempt to give himself a body, she inadvertently hits Lain and causes her to bleed. This serves as a sharp reminder to Lain that regardless of the circumstances behind her birth she has a human heart and body, that human beings are alive and not just fabrications to be toyed with. And with this, Lain awakens from the misguided mindstate she had been in during the preceding episodes.

In the end, Lain resolves to make the ultimate sacrifice for her friend. With the warmth of human connection spurring a rekindled passion inside her, she decides to use her powers not as the harbinger of Protocol 7 but rather to remove it from existence entirely. All along Lain just wanted to do something nice for Arisu but after all her efforts went wrong she realised that the only possible thing left to do that could make it all up to her was to take a step back and erase herself from the perceived public sphere. After a moment’s hesitation of loneliness in her subconscious space where she begins to feel like she is drowning under the weight of the large-scale rewrite she was just about to do, the image she has of her loving father appears to her one last time and helps her to coax out her true feelings – that she loves everybody and wants to protect their freedom to be human. And with this final encouragement, Lain utilises the full extent of her abilities to rewrite the memories of everyone alive on earth, permanently deleting everything relating to the existence of herself and Protocol 7 –  A world where the Knights were never formed, and where Eiri Masami never invented his reality-breaking protocol in pursuit of deification. Through a genuine wish to preserve the human soul inside every living person, Lain writes herself out of history to keep the reins of reality away from the hands of those who would manipulate it for their own selfish purposes. By sealing away her ego once more and stepping down from conscious reality, she sets the world back on the right path. Where humans are just humans, not data that dreams of being god.