Serial Experiments Lain E6: “Kids”

Present day. Present time. Presently starting to make some kind of sense, I hope. Let's go!


This intro really is good. Fitting to the show, unusual for anime in its juxtaposition of the usual animu-montage visuals and a mournful English soft rock song in a way that makes it memorable, and just...it creates the mood. Anyway, our non-cyberdemon voiceover quote for Layer 06: Kids is "If people can connect to one another, even the smallest voice will become loud. If people can connect to one another, even their lives will become longer." The decades since this came out have proven these statements...right, sort of? Potentially? Kinda right, but also kinda wrong.

Anyway, it's nighttime, and Lain's dad is watching the door to her room as the pale blue light of monitor screens spills out under and around it. His glasses aren't doing the evil anime lens flare right now, so I think the part of him that cares about his daughter and isn't being puppetted by anything external is active now. He knocks cautiously at the door. When there's no response, he warns Lain that he's about to come in, and then opens the door to discover that she's continued the assimilation process of the house.

I'm not even going to ask where she got all that stuff. She can probably build it out of junkyard scrap or conjure it out of the eighth dimension at this point. In addition to the wires, monitors, and equipment racks, she's also got what looks like a steam engine in one corner, which is sending an ominous green fluid through a set of annulated pipes that look like she could have gotten them at a Sin Inc garage sale. Also, there are holograms floating in the air over her head, because of course there are.

He calls her name, but she doesn't react. He steps inside, and sees that she's staring blankly at one of the monitors, a sleepy smile plastered across her glassy-eyed face. We then see her engaged in animated conversation with some flickering blobs of color within their directionless white void in the Wired, whose creepy chattering noises she can apparently understand just fine.

We can only understand her side of the conversation, but she seems to be thanking them for all the hardware they keep sending her. Okay, that's where she's getting the components to build her hive center from. She also identifies her benefactors as the Knights.

So, they could be other (trans?)humans scattered around the world communicating through a filter of anonymity, or they could be bodiless Wired entities. Of course, it's also very possible that they started as the former and slowly became the later, in which case, I imagine Lain will be joining them soon enough.

As the scene fades to white, a distant voice shouts the words "yeah right!" Not sure if I recognize it or not. Then, Lain and her bloody shadow are walking down the street under the glaring monochrome sun. The wires of her new home cast shadows of their own all around.

Something about one of the telephone poles gets her attention. Then, up ahead on the street, she sees a boy standing with his arms outstretched, as if worshiping the massive radio towers that rise above the city skyline in the background. Jump ahead to her at school, where Lain's friends approach her after class while she's playing a phone game. They've been worried about her lately; after becoming more social for a while, she's started to turn back into her withdrawn old self (just with more computer literacy now). They tell her that it's not healthy to be alone so much, and Lain denies that she is alone; she has her Wired friends.

They ask her what kind of sites she's been hanging out at, and she refuses to tell. Arizu looks very worried at this, while the other two are just irritated. I imagine that they think it's some embarrassing slashfic community, while Arizu suspects the truth of community.resistanceisfutile.net's central role in Lain's online life. Anyway, they talk her into going shopping with them after school.

While they're at their usual open air mall, Lain notices that praying kid again. In fact, there seems to be more than one of them scattered around the place.

She follows their gaze, which this time brings her eyes up past the radio towers and toward a patch of clouds hanging in front of the sun. As she watches, the clouds part to reveal that the sun has been replaced by a SHAFT intro sequence version of herself.

She gasps. Seeing her reaction, her friends follow her gaze, and they all see it as well. After a few moments, the clouds close back in again and the mirage (if that's even what it was) vanishes.

Cut to Lain's house a bit later. Unusually, her sister is back home early, while Lain is out later. Said sister is watching the news on TV, and ignoring their mother's attempts at conversation. When we eventually get a camera angle on her face, it looks like this:

Could just be trauma from what happened yesterday, or it could be that her own brain has been sucked into cyberspace now.

Lain eventually comes home herself and reports straight to the nascent hive-cluster. Some of the computers are playing news - either local or speculation from across the Wired - about the vision that many Tokyo residents had this afternoon. Lain listens to this with a frown, and then instructs her Navi to, and I quote, "connecto wiredo." Apparently the company that made it has really, really shitty Japanese language settings that only recognize saliently mispronounced English. Colors flash. The inside-the-wired vortex appears faintly. Then Lain is in a black void talking to a flying disembodied mouth.

The mouth is really excited to meet her. Her ability to manifest a virtual representation of her entire body inside of the Wired is apparently something that only the really skilled or experienced techno-cultists can do. All he can manifest is his mouth, and most can't even do that much.

"Cheshire Cat" as she calls him has a fairly annoying personality, but he's also honored to help someone as famous as Lain, and eager to help her (though not willing to stop babbling when she asks, tells, or demands him to). Cheshire seems to be an information broker of sorts, and with enough prodding he finally tells Lain what she wants to know about the origins of that children's multiplayer game that looks like Spooky's House of Jumpscares and acts like The King In Yellow. According to Cheshire, the phenomena she's describing might be related to a certain known individual's field of expertise. He calls up an old photo of a dour, bearded man who Lain apparently knows by reputation.

That's...not a reassuring epithet.

Lain had already researched this guy, but seems to have been hoping he wasn't actually related to this. Doctor Hodgeson's physical form is dying in a hospital ward, but he can be reached through the Wired lesbian missile nipple robot style. Cheshire tells her to ask him about the "KIDS" project, which she irritably tells him she would have done anyway because that's literally the one thing that Dr. Hodgeson is famous for.

Okay. Time to hack into (or is it even hacking at this point, for Lain?) a mad scientist's hospital Wired interface.

Dr. Hodgeson has a fully realized Wired avatar just like Lain's, and is lounging on a deck chair on a vaguely solarpunk-looking ruined temple floating in some orange clouds.

As one does, when one is a dying mad scientist in an eldritch cyberpunk netherworld.

The doctor rambles about how he just wants to wait for death in serenity and peace, and then complements Lain on her lifelike avatar (which is also an implicit boast, since his own avatar is similarly perfect). She doesn't let him distract her, though. She coldly, firmly demands to know everything he can explain to her about the KIDS project he performed 15 years ago that earned him his notoriety.

He starts by saying that he never meant for the children he experimented on to come to harm. And he sounds like he means it, though it's not clear how much actual guilt there is in him as opposed to just regret at a personal failure. He also, when asked, tells her that he's not responsible for what's going on now, though he is aware of it. He thought he'd erased all the data from his ill-fated "Kensington experiment," but someone must have somehow recovered it and repeated it using this Spooky's Jumpscare-ish game.

He shows her a bunch of images of some kind of very large and well funded lab. I'm thinking either government, major university, or maybe pharma corporation. The name "Kensington" makes me think university. Anyway, Dr. Hodgeson and Co were researching developmental parapsychology. The crazy bastards discovered that children, up until a certain age, have very, very, very minute psychic powers. And got a grant to study this further.

So. Serial Experiments Lain is set in a world in which psychic powers in children have been a known and verified phenomenon for at least fifteen years.

That is...kind of jarring, to be honest? Up until now, this just seemed like a "what we thought computers were going to look like soon in the 1990's" sort of near future. Just casually throwing psionics in there as an established and studied thing six episodes in gives me some serious whiplash. I know that "we're about to discover that humans really do have psychic powers! honest, just a couple more years now!" was taken as almost a given in a lot of 80's and 90's scifi, but...still. This is the kind of thing that needed to be established earlier.

Anyway. The KIDS system was designed to stimulate the brains of a large number of children using devices called "outer receptors" in a way that would activate their individually very minor psionic powers, and then concentrate all of it on a large device in the center of the test chamber designed to do...something?...with it. The scientists don't seem to have really known what to expect. They just wanted to see what would happen if you got kids (particularly strong psionic kids, in particular. There was a screening process) to pool their psychic energy in one place so that it could be studied in greater than trace amounts.

It's not clear exactly what happened. We just see lots of white light, and an implication that a lot of children died. Either there was an explosion, or the kids just disintegrated in their outer receiver pods. Whatever the case, charges were filed, careers were ended, and the disgraced Dr. Hodgeson smashed the RIDICULOUSBACKRONYM system and wiped all the data. However, he recently discovered that someone, somewhere in the depths of the Wired claims to have recovered the design. And, if these new events are indeed related, they must have replicated a version of it. The existence of the Wired, Dr. Hodgeson says, might be opening design opportunities that his own team didn't have back at Kensington. Maybe the AR game acts as an outer reciever, with the Wired conducting their psychic energy and concentrating it...somewhere. For something.

Well then. Maybe this is where Rudolph is getting its ability to act upon the physical world. It got ahold of the BACKRONYM schematics and is now soaking up psionic energy from the kids playing that game and using it to manipulate the world beyond its own informational realm.

I'm less sure now about there being multiple cyberdemons. If so, I think only Rudolph is bootstrapping himself to not-only-cyber demonhood using this technique.

Dr. Hodgeson finishes his musings with the sentiment that if someone actually DID manage to rig up a stochastic BACKRONYM system using just consumer electronics and the Wired, they have his admiration. Lain is kinda pissed off at him saying that without a care for the children who are being driven insane or dying whenever this new system has a hiccup. She seems really distraught over this; I guess Lain has a lot more empathy and compassion than she's generally shown before.

Hmm. DID she have these traits before, though? How much of Lain is still Lain? How much is she changing from moment to moment as she exchanges data with the Wired?

He just says that his compassion wouldn't do anyone any good, and neither would his condemnation. He then tells Lain that she's "truly powerful," and that "whatever kind of being she's trying to become" she might well be on the cusp of it.

I do not know...what does he...?

Is he saying that Lain is, like, a rare case of someone who retained their trace psychic powers after childhood? If so, that would explain why Rudolph is paying so much attention to her. In fact...he may be using her as the center of his bootleg BACKRONYM network. Some combination of mental, physical, and psionic traits that make her a useful focal point for all the kids' energy? That would explain...quite a lot, actually. Including why that random creepy elf kid and his friends are so worshipful of her. And why her image kept appearing in the AR game. And in the sky. Were the kids staring into the sky and praying because they saw her there before anyone else did, or did her image appear in the sky because of what the kids and their manipulator were doing?

Well, if that's the case, Lain is probably going to become Rudolph's...host...nucleus...herald...something. Also, the doctor either dies or logs off really dramatically.

As he vanishes, she realizes that the Knights are most likely responsible for this new iteration of BACKRONYM. And, at least for the time being, she views herself to be an independent enough entity from the Knights to not be okay with this.

Lain wakes up in front of her computer, shoos the flitting holograms over her head away, and starts demanding answers from the Knights. None seem to be forthcoming, though of course we can only hear Lain's side of the conversation. She asks them if they're just doing all this for some sick joke or something. Erm...no, Lain, I don't think that these are just 4chan griefers.

She starts calling them pathetic, and laughing sort of maniacally. Shit. What's going to happen to her hive now? Does she still control it? Do they? Does Rudolph? Does anyone or anything?

The green liquid in the pipes starts bubbling disconcertingly. As she disses them harder and harder, the steam engine also starts sprouting leaks. Shit, what's her dissent causing now? And...oh. Oh boy. Red laser sights start flickering around in her room again. It's these guys again:

Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not.

Lain is either unable or unwilling to technopathic blast them again. Instead, she runs downstairs (family is all asleep at this point, I guess) and makes the brave and/or insane decision to confront them face to face. She asks them if they're Knights. They don't answer for a minute. Then, one of them warns her to get down, and a second later her bedroom explodes.

They then explain that they are not the Knights, but rather enemies of theirs. The Knights, they claim, included a remotely triggered bomb in some of the parts they sent her, and must have set it off when they realized she was turning against them.

I'm not sure if I buy that. How could these guys have known when the bomb was about to blow up to within the second if they had nothing to do with it? I guess it's possible they're listening in on enemy communications or something, but...well, we have only their own word. Which they then drive away without sharing any more of, leaving Lain and her family with an exploded bedroom full of ruined computers and accessories. End episode.


This episode DID answer a lot of questions, but not the ones that were raised in the previous one. Of course, a lot of what we "learned" last ep was probably from very, very unreliable sources, so just about all of the mumbo jumbo about time and reality could have been bullshit (though in that case, I'm not sure what the hell was happening to Lain's sister). This ep, aside from the WTF genre-twisting addition of plain old psychic powers, doesn't do anything with the nature of reality or postulate that the Wired is a gateway into a "true" world of information that existed before it. We're back in the realm of puzzles that can actually be solved by an attentive audience, at least for now.

My main takeaway from this episode was the question of Lain's identity. After episode 4, I concluded that she was basically gone. And, I'm still not sure that I was wrong. Lain is a completely different person in this episode than she's been before. Is this her true self, grown and emboldened by its experiences in the Wired, returning home? Or is this an entirely new persona that's just taken over/developed in the body? Notably, Lain previously reacted to the Knights, the men in black, etc as if she knew something about them that I don't. In this episode, she's much closer to being on the same page as the audience. Again, I don't know if that means she's more "free" now, or if she's less so, or if the Lain we started the show with no longer exists at all.

Anyway, it was a much less frustrating watch at least.