THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON CRACKY

Once upon a time a little girl who wanted to be a Goddess lived in Oxford.

The first time she saw Lain, her brother said to her, “you’re just like Lain!”, because she also was a silent girl who liked to stay in her room with her computer.

She liked being called Lain. And she tried to look like her as much as possible. She wanted to be Lain. She had similar pyjamas, with mittens that looked like bear paws, but they became too small by the time she had reached 13. She even cut her hair like Lain, and before she got tired of it she also had the long lock of hair on one side with the elastic band.

Layer 01: Lain

Lain is a strange anime series, which never fully explains things but gives you clues on what is going on, so that events may often have several different interpretations.

In the world of Lain, “the wired” is the Internet but in a different way. It overlaps with the real world, and is some sort of Metaverse in that people inside it use avatars, not unlike what we can now find in OpenSim or Second Life.

As the story develops, we find out that the real world and the wired are linking deeper and deeper into each other until there’s a point they can fully connect through Protocol 7. But it is not just the wired: the collective unconscious of the human race emerges as a global brain, connecting humans among themselves.

The world we conceive as real is a shared hallucination which can change if such is the will from those who inhabit it, and the same thing happens in the wired. However, it is once mentioned in the series that there is also a role to be played by the ECCO, the Earth Coincidence Control Office that John C. Lilly spoke about.

Of uncertain origin, Lain is a child-Goddess that becomes mythical once she starts to dive deep into the wired. She becomes the object of devotion of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus, a group of mystics/hackers who point to the idea of the templar knights. It is for her that they open the sky and her face appears between the clouds. And in the wired, Lain ends up putting the false God in its place, yet the nature of the mystery that she is will never be fully revealed: She who kept Protocol 7 inside her brain, to put together the wired and meatspace and connect humans among themselves and to their collective unconscious.

Lain is a goddess who exists physically.