Serial Experiments Lain E3: “Psyche”

Last time on Serial Experiments Lane, our heroine or something acting through her diffused a situation with a mad shooter by making him turn the weapon on himself. This episode starts with the police arriving in force at Club Cyberia, where the event took place. Lain's friend helps her out of the club; Lain herself still has a zombie-like expression, and sees like she'd just be standing in place and staring at the wall if she wasn't being walked.

A voiceover accompanies this, of someone asking someone else if they've heard of a girl named Lain. Lain, of the Wired.

"Of the Wired," huh? The Wired hasn't yet been defined for us, but it's implied to either refer to cyberspace in general (a 1998-era future synonym for "internet" or "world wide web," etc), or to some specific virtual reality part of it. This voiceover must be speaking from a future perspective, as Lain certainly doesn't seem to be "of" the Wired yet, unless the entire show so far has taken place in the Matrix.

Title drop, with spooky synthesized demon voice reading "Psyche, Layer Three" aloud. Then we jump to the police station, where Lain is being questioned. The police try calling her parents, but the number she provides them with doesn't work. Eventually, frustrated with her laconic answers and deciding this girl doesn't know anything after all, they give her and her friend a ride home. Said friend, Arizu, apologizes profusely to Lain for dragging her to Cyberia tonight. Lain just slowly repeats the syllables of her name. "A...ri...zu."

No one seems to be especially concerned about her doing this. But then, who knows if she actually is doing it out loud.

The police let Lain out in front of her house in the predawn semi-darkness. As tense, Exorcist-like music plays, Lain enters and has a look across her familiar living room. It's a comfortable 15 meter length of repeated, sterile lounge furniture, with some bioluminescent white blobs swimming around outside the windows.

I'm pretty sure it didn't look like this before, but that's just par for the course for this show. It's not like anyone was expecting Lain's visions or hallucinations to be getting better after her little Harbinger incident a few hours ago. Really, she's just lucky the furniture isn't oozing blood across a writhing carpet made of her parents' screaming faces or whatever. Speaking of her parents, they're still nowhere to be found. Their beds are perfectly cleared and set, hotel style, and there's no one home.

I don't recall anything about them expecting to be out of the house until dawn. But the police couldn't reach them, and now they're not here.

Lain moves on to her own bedroom, and the camera distorts as she moves on to make it look like the house is growing around her as she walks and the hallway in front of her is a black tunnel stretching into nothingness. However, she manages to make it to her room, and to her new navi. She stares at the screen in apprehension from her bedroom door before slowly shuffling toward it. The angle and framing of her stuffed animals making it look like she's walking down an aisle toward a temple altar.

She sits down in front of it, but then just watches the screensaver without so much as bringing her hands up to the mouse and keyboard. She appears to briefly fall asleep on the desk, but then she's suddenly sitting upright again. Did she actually fall asleep, or only think she was doing so? Who can tell. After a little while, she gets up and starts to move toward her bed, but then seems to change her mind and just wanders the house. All the while, the high-pitched Exorcist piano beats continue.

She returns to her room and checks her email. Nothing. She bids her navi goodnight, and its synthesized voice says goodnight back. From the way Lain stares at it after it does this, it's implied that answering her goodnight is not normal behavior for navis, or at least not for her UI program. Still, she takes off her coat and slippers and finally goes to bed. The camera hangs over her sleeping body and the creepy piano continues playing until morning, when she wakes up amid the usual eye-searing glare of a judgmental heaven. Just normal morning sunshine in Japan, you know.

Let's see if her parents exist again this morning.

Well, her mother does at least. She scolds her for oversleeping and being late for school. Without a word of explanation of where she and her husband were all night, or why neither of them came upstairs to check on Lain when she didn't come down in time. Also, either the police didn't leave them a message, or she just didn't bother checking. #parenting. Lain starts to tell her mother about what happened last night, but then decides not to and just eats her late breakfast and heads out.

On her way to the train stop, Lain sees a black car with tinted windows parked in the same spot where the man with no shadow and fucked up eyes was standing the other day. On the bright side, the car has a shadow. On the not so bright side, there's a single blazing red eye - or perhaps a laser site, like from the gun the shooter at the club was using - glaring at her from inside of it. She hurries past it in a panic.

On the ride, a disembodied male voice calls her name. She looks around for the source of it, but there really isn't one, and it continues speaking to her.

She whispers out a quiet "Who's there?" and the voice replies by cryptically telling her that she's not alone.

Then we jump to Lain arriving at school. The voice may or may not have told her more. We already know that the show is withholding information from us, with Lain being strongly implied to have done unusual things in between cuts. And the last major incident of this was also after being approached by a ghostly presence. If there's a possession type thing going on, we (and she) may not always be privy to what her body is doing while she's possessed.

At homeroom, the friends who Lain went to the club with are being interrogated by classmates. Bizarrely, the two things they're most curious about are 1) how much blood there was, and 2) how hot the mass shooter was before he blew his own head off.

-_-

Maybe Lain is actually the normal one in her school after all.

Uniquely among the throng, Arizu asks if Lain is okay and doesn't seem to be playing up the event for popularity's sake. Lain and her exchange some extremely heterosexual smiles.

Well, assuming this isn't just a one-sided feeling in Lain's own head, it has the potential to be a sorely needed anchor in her life.

During one of her classes, we hear a droning, garbled voice lecturing about some sort of microchip called a "psyche" that boosts a navi's ability to process and transmit information through the Wired. It's a male voice, so while we can't see exactly what the teacher is writing on the blackboard we know that it isn't her. As Lain listens to the Call of Mechthulhu speaking over her teacher, she's scribbling a spiral-like pattern that puts me in mind of either a whirlpool or a funnel web spider's lair.

Uzumaki!

The ghostly, staticy Psyche commercial is interrupted by Chisa the dead girl explaining how she had no reason to remain in meatspace anymore. This startles Lain into looking up, where she sees Chisa's ghost staring at her through the little window in the classroom door. Lain starts freaking out, clutching her head to force the voices and visions out, but her eyes fall on the spiral scribble she just drew, and it starts spinning around while making a Reaper noise that she interprets as the question "who is Lain?" on infinite repeat.

Jump straight from there to Lain and (some distance away) her peers at their lockers as school is getting out. Arizu is pointing out that none of them - herself included - seem to be taking what happened last night nearly as seriously as they should be. It just feels like something they saw in a movie, rather than a real mass shooting and the bizarre Lain-induced suicide that followed it. As they converse, Lain opens her locker and finds a sealed envelope in it. Arizu encouragingly asks her if it's a love letter. The other girls just run up and pluck the envelope out of Lain's hands to open it themselves, over both her own and Arizu's objections.

To their disappointment, it's just a small brick of packing foam, with a tiny microchip bound to it.

When Lain indicates that she doesn't know what it is or who it's from, they dismiss it as boring and seem to be judging her for it. Lain, Arizu, why are you friends with these people?

Lain stops and looks at the little chip (which I can only assume is a Psyche) repeatedly along her way home. At one point, she just stops and whispers "psyche," as if she's just identified it, or else had the information beamed into her head by whatever cybernetic assimilation monster it is that's gotten its hooks in her.

Then, the camera rises up to the telephone wires that have been the subject of many of Lain's hallucinations, and we hear snippets of different conversations being had through them. The "Wired" I suppose. Some of them, like lovers professing their feelings for each other and companies rejecting job applications, don't seem relevant to the story so far. Others, like Accela distributors worrying about the fallout from that shooting incident, and someone talking about how the (apparently secret?) Psyche chip was developed by a Taiwanese secret society called the Knights, seem more directly relevant.

As the conversation snippets get stranger and more far-out, with people talking about being paralyzed by little child-monsters and so forth, the camera zooms in on one of the wires before switching to this imagery:

I'm not completely sure, but I think that's a view from inside of a cable, surrounded by wire coating. What the information traveling through the lines would see if electronic pulses had a sense of vision. And, of course, it's obviously what Lain was drawing in her trance during class. Funny how the real thing looks less ominous than her version, even though the real version has some pretty existentially horrifying implications.

Chisa talks about how giving up her physical body was just a formality by the time she did it. If Lain's own consciousness is spending part of its time within the web, then she's already well into the process of losing her own. And it seems like other Wired residents - or a gestalt of many of them - are taking out a timeshare on her body while she's partly or completely outside of it. Or something like that.

Jump ahead to Lain in her room, listening to music and staring at her screensaver while the digital communications continue. Eventually, she looks away from the screen and at the chip in her hand. "Lain, why won't you come here?" she repeats to herself, recalling the words of the ghost. Her father randomly comes in to ask how she's liking her new Navi, and she asks him if he knows what this mysterious chip that showed up in her locker is.

The instant he sees it, the warmth drains from his face. He says he doesn't know what it is, and then turns around and walks away without even getting to hear the answer to his own question. Nothing suspicious here.

Lain stares at her Navi for a good long while after this, before deciding to go outside. Where is she going? I don't think even she knows. When she steps out the door, that car is back, and this time there are two glowing red eyespots that follow her from behind the tinted windows.

Lain hurries past it, and runs off to Cyberia. Because that's a reasonable thing for a person to do after what happened there last night.

She enters the club nervously, tiptoeing between the crowds of older dancers while keeping her head down and looking scared and exposed. A twenty-something guy recognizes her, and greets her enthusiastically, complementing her on her "little girl" outfit. If he didn't know better he'd think she really was fourteen! As Lain stares at him in trepidation, he tells her they should throw another party, and that he'll leave the planning to her. She just nervously nods, and then they part ways.

Lain definitely has been coming here as her friends accused, and she hasn't been herself while doing so. Either that, or hallucinations of her at the club partying hard have been implanting themselves into the minds of other clubgoers. Probably the former, going by the missing time between cuts after she meets the ghosts.

After moving on, Lain sees three gradeschool kids sitting around a table in a back corner. Not even pretending to be older, or trying to blend in at all. What the actual fuck. Lain approaches them, and just totally unsolicitedly asks them if they know what the chip she brought here is.

Are these like...fey? Cyberpunk faerie spirits that haunt the club wearing child-like forms?

I have no idea who they are, what they're doing here, and how Lain knows them. Maybe she has partial memories of her previous visits in her wilder persona?

They confirm that it's a Psyche, and that it could give even a cheap handheld device near-perfect Wired access. One of them tries to buy it off of her before she can even ask anything else, but another shuts him down, telling him he could never afford even a secondhand Psyche. When Lain says that her desktop Navi is a high-end Tachibana model, the kids are all stunned. Combine that chip with that Navi, and she'll have full, complete access to the entire Wired.

...

I'm struggling to understand how the Wired works, and what this chip actually does for you. It obviously doesn't work like the real life internet, where better hardware is just going to give you better speed and let you take advantage of higher bandwidths. The Wired seems to be more...fantastical? Is that the right word? Either way, I don't think it's just a matter of how many browser tabs and chat windows you can have open at once.

...

They tell her how to jury-rig the Psyche into her Navi; apparently, Lain's middle school curriculum includes basic computer hardware assembly, so she can do it herself with their instructions. I wish my middle school offered that, even in the 2000's.

She thanks them and starts to leave, but the boy who gave her the installation instructions stops her. Information isn't free, he says. Not in the Wired, and not in meatspace either. He then asks if she's Lain. When she confusedly nods yes, he tells her that he knows her by reputation, and that he's...erm:

Does he mean that he's seen pictures or videos of last night's incident? Or something weirder, involving souls being sucked into the network?

He says that it's not unusual for people to take on a different persona in the Wired than they have in real life, but that hers is a very extreme case. Also, he saw her here at Cyberia the night that the shooting happened, didn't he? He asks her what she's planning.

No explanation. No context. Just, "what are you planning?" He doesn't seem afraid of her though, so much as just mischievously curious.

Okaaaay then.

Little sixth grade faerie boy asks Lain for a date in exchange for his information. But not the way she is now. He wants a date with the other version of Lain. The wild, crazy, exciting one.

Lain responds by going stern and giving him the cold machine-glare that she used on the shooter, and he immediately apologizes and begs her forgiveness and flees. His friends follow, though even they don't seem to know what the hell just happened.

Hmm. The term "data double" has grown in prominence over the years. I'm starting to think that in this world, data doubles may be much more literal.

The next day, a girl who bears a strong resemblance to both Lain and her mother walks up to the house. Lain has a sister, I guess? Did we see her at the meal scenes before now? I feel like we didn't. Maybe this is a flashback or flashforward or something? Anyway, she arrives at the door, passing the black car on her way over, and finds two men skulking in the shadows by the entrance. They're wearing dark, machinery-covered sunglass/headset pieces, with a red eyelike light at the bridge of the nose.

So that's what the red lights watching from inside the car were. I wonder if the dark lenses of their glasses are to hide fucked up twitching pupils, like the man that Lain saw on the street there previously? I suspect that their brains aren't normal human ones anymore. Whether from infostation, or actual cybernetic implants.

Anyway, the definitely not borg drones tell her that they were never here and she never saw them before marching to their car and driving off. The girl comes in side, and tells her mother about the incident before going upstairs and peeking in Lain's room. Okay, I guess this definitely is Lain's older sister then. Lain has her Navi open, and is working away at installing the chip.

When her sister asks her what she's doing, she explains that she thinks wearing less while she works will prevent static shocks. Um. Okay, Lain. Maybe you should consider gloves in that case?

Then, suddenly, Lain looks up with a completely different expression, grinning broadly, and enthusiastically says "HI SIS!"

♪ "I'll be the rouuuuund-about" ♪

End episode.


There's not much I can say about this one. Lots of questions raised, and pretty much none answered. I felt like this was the slowest Lain episode so far; no real turning points or dramatic shifts in it, just working us slowly toward the next event. So, I'll say more about it in retrospect after the next episode.