Serial Experiments Lain E4: “Religion”

Maybe this episode will be where we start learning more about the scattered god that inhabits the Wired, and the humans it calls to join it there.

The episode's pre-title card voiceover is a girl who sounds like it could be Lain saying "I don't need parents. Humans are all alone. They're not connected to anyone at all." Either a direct contradiction of the previous statements, or most of the characters we've seen aren't purely "human" anymore, and this voiceover is speaking of humans dismissively as an other. I feel like the second one is closer to the mark.

We open on Lain, still crouching over her open Navi and leafing through a computer science textbook as she works. Jury-rigging in the Psyche chip looks like a more difficult process than the imp-kid-thing at Cyberia made it sound.

At one point, her father peeks in and looks concerned, but he doesn't say anything. After a few moments, h withdraws and closes the door behind him without Lain noticing.

Downstairs, Lain's sister grabs something out of the fridge, and takes a drink directly from the bottle after looking around to make sure no one sees. I'm guessing it's something alcoholic and she's underaged, or maybe she just gets a perverse thrill out of putting her germs into everything without anyone knowing. There's also something much weirder going on here, though.

Three unopened cartons of milk? Who the hell buys this? Why would anyone? I'm writing this down on my notes as a vital piece of the puzzle, because that shit is not normal.

In the living room, which has shrunk down to normal size, the parents are having a quiet conversation about their younger daughter. When the older one comes in and tells them that Lain is acting even weirder than normal, they tell her to go away, and then quietly agree as soon as she's out of earshot. #parenting.

They kinda sorta semi-embrace each other, and Lain's dad has the evil glasses glare again.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the evening neighborhood, a man is screaming in terror and running from an unseen pursuer. Go back to your own show Shiki, we already have a spooky teenaged girl in this one and I need a break from you. The man reaches his door and fumbles for his keys, but in his panic he drops them, giving his pursuer time to catch up.

...and it's yet another spooky little girl, but this one at least is more in "The Shining" age range rather than "Carrie." So at least that's different.

He freaks out completely at the sight of her, in a manner not dissimilar to how the shooter in the club reacted to Lain. I guess the cyberdemon has an affinity for using diminutive Japanese girls as its conduits, or something. He begs her to leave him alone, she ignores him. He turns back around to try at his door again, but she comes up behind him and - in awkward, Half Life G-Man style syllable emphasis - says the word "Gotcha."

Zoom out over the cityscape, as the man's final scream echoes out across it.

The next day at school, Lain's friends are discussing another instance of high school seniors committing suicide by jumping. I take back what I said before: come back here Shiki, this town clearly needs your particular skillset. This one was a boy, and from a different school. The man running away from the little girl last night looked older than a high school senior, so probably not related. Alizu asks Lain if she heard anything about it, and when the other girls start to brush off that possibility on account of Lain not knowing much of anything about anything, Lain surprises them by volunteering new information.

Also, she's hiding a computer science textbook behind her back. Not sure why she's being secretive about this, but I suppose the cyberdemon might be including a discretion command to all assimilees just in case.

She tells them that she's been reading all about it on the Wired, through various confirmed and unconfirmed sources. She seems awfully happy to be talking about this, also. It's kinda unsettling to say the least. Maybe she's just happy to have something to contribute to the conversation for once, or maybe part of her is already pleased to have fully assimilated a new mind into its network or whatever.

This reminds Arizu that Lain has just gotten a new Navi, and asks if she can show it off. Lain says that she'd love to, but it's still kind of in pieces while she patches in some custom hardware. Everyone is much more taken aback to hear about this detail, given how technophobic Lain has been in the past. The two nameless jerks interrogate Lain skeptically, and conclude that she's undergoing some sort of weird change. Arizu just looks silently concerned.

After school, Lain tells the others more about the suicides. Wired rumor has it that all the cases so far were hooked on one particular online game. She continues to be very cheery as she explains this, and is wolfing down the street food that her friends are nibbling at. After a little while, she tells them she needs to run home to finish customizing her Navi.

One of the jerks gets butthurt about her brushing them off for a machine. Arizu, as per usual, tells her to leave Lain alone. Still, after Lain's left, all are in agreement that she's acting really weird. Or at least, different from her usual kind of weirdness. As they discuss this, little murder girl bumps into Arizu and drops her stuffed dog. She quickly apologizes, and then runs off back to her mother or older sister or whatever, who is not a gynoid.

That evening, Lain finishes setting up her reconfigured Navi. She seems to have added a lot more to it than just the Psyche chip, considering that the end result could best be described as redecorating her bedroom in Borg.

She signs back in, and checks her email for the first time in the last couple of days since she started the modification project. Her only new message is from someone who she consulted about installing her Psyche chip, but as she's already managed that herself it doesn't much matter. Is that someone the weird little kid she talked to at Cyberia? Possibly.

Speaking of Cyberia, the twenty-something DJ there who she apparently has a history with is setting up for tonight's music. Lain goes there and asks him if he knows anything about that game the suicide victims were playing. He replies that he doesn't, as its generally designed for a younger playerbase than him. He just knows that it's called Phantoma. Presumably, it's the sequel to older VR game Stardust the Super Wizard. He then looks up, and sees that he's alone in the room. Lain isn't there.

He wonders if he's hallucinating. More likely, Lain (or the thing that's absorbing Lain) was just using her voice to contact him technopathically or something. I wonder if he has any sort of cybernetic implants that it could be using to do that? Or maybe an old Accela pill still in his gut? Or just a Wired-connected piece of machinery in the room? Assuming it isn't just able to speak directly into human brains with actual mystical telepathy, of course.

From there, we jump to another panicked man running in terror through the nighttime streets, this one young enough to be a high schooler. He doesn't appear to be running from anything in particular, at first, until the camera goes into his point of view, and we learn that the virtual reality game that's been costing so many young people their lives is...

...Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion.

He shouts that he quits, he wants out, he doesn't want to do this anymore. But Spooky's procedurally generated labyrinth keeps following him, and the Specimen currently on his tail gets close enough to reveal that it's a glowing, ghostly version of Lain. He tries throwing a smart device he had in his pocket on the pavement, breaking it, but that doesn't help either. The Jumpscare Mansion keeps flickering on and off over the world around him, until finally it just stays "on."

I wonder. Are some of these suicides accidental? People running off of rooftops and the like because of this VR overlay blinding them to real hazards? That wasn't the case with Chisa back in the pilot, but it could be with some of the others.

As he staggers through the blinding bad-graphics maze, he screams that "this isn't the Wired, why is this happening?" I'm still not sure exactly how the Wired works. Is it just a virtual reality internet? If so, does this game normally engulf you when you're just browsing, out of the blue? Sounds like a pretty annoying game even before it starts following you into IRL and making you kill yourself. Behind him, Specimen Lain tells him to stop running. He shouts back at Lain's voice that he needs help, and asks if she's a "PK" like himself. PsychoKinetic? Psyche-Konnected? IDK. She tells him that she'd like to help, but that she can't reach him there. Okay. Then he runs into a bunch of glowing palm prints that terrify him nearly to the point of unconsciousness.

He turns to run from the incandescent handprints, only to find himself face to face with the little murdergirl. He shrieks and shouts like a madman as she makes a Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion death screen face at him.

However, rather than his soul being condemned to wander an endless maze, he starts shooting at her with an imaginary pistol. Whenever he moves his hands to adjust and fire it, there are actual gun noises, so I'm guessing this is an AR/VR thing that we're not being shown for whatever reason. Murdergirl levitates into the air, and then jerks and twitches with each virtual bullet. He shoots until she collapses, and then empties his imaginary clip into her motionless body before curling up on the ground and hugging his knees.

He's still curled up and hugging his knees in front of a school (which to him looks like Spooky's lair) by the time morning comes. On the pavement in front of him are scattered some strange, cloth-wrapped objects, one of which looks conspicuously like a child's body wrapped in a tarp. After a little while, the glowing version of Lain appears to him once again.

It looked like he was running away from her at the beginning of this sequence, but maybe I misinterpreted. He seems to regard her as a friendly.

As she watches, he rambles to himself in a horrified whisper about how he was just afraid. He didn't know it was really just a little girl. It's not his fault.

Did he actually, somehow, kill the little murderkid? He seems to think that he did. I don't know if that belief of his is any more (or any less) grounded than his belief that he was in Spooky's mansion being chased by monsters and glowing hand things.

He explains to us that Phantoma is a virtual reality multiplayer FPS, available for free online from an unlicensed webhost that no one has been able to track down (or block). His friends' server looks like a bad graphics dungeon environment, but somehow it got cross wired with a VR tag game for kindergartners. And um. I guess if you shoot someone in Phantoma they die in real life? He seems to think he actually killed that little girl, at least.

Back in her room ("back." Did she ever leave it?), Lain is researching Phantoma. It turns out that it has a history of inexplicably linking with other VR programs, pulling users of other games and educational software and the like into its own metanetwork and exposing them to other things that it's absorbed. Rumor has it that Phantoma was created, and hosted, by the Knights; the same shadowy organization that created the Psyche chips in those illegal factories in Taiwan and then flooded the black market with them.

The Knights are almost definitely the agents of the cyberdemon. If it claims to be a god, perhaps they'd be its priests or missionaries. Maybe they're still human themselves. Maybe not.

As Lain continues researching the Knights, her father comes in. He's happy to see that she and the Wired are getting along so well, but warns her not to forget what's real and what isn't. The Wired is a realm of pure information, an intricate exchange of data that creates the illusion of a persistent world. It's just an illusion, though.

I'm guessing the recent news stories about VR game related deaths have gotten him worried. If so, this is the most responsible bit of parenting we've seen from Lain's family so far.

Then, he asks if she understands what he's warning her about, and his tone of voice makes it seem like he's expecting her to pick up some sort of hidden subtext. He was smiling a second ago, but now his expression goes grave, and the glare starts to come back over the corners of his glasses.

Lain just grins a creepy grin back at him, and tells him that he's wrong. The Wired is real, and meatspace is not so seperate from it. Soon, she says, still grinning, she believes she will be able to immerse herself into the Wired completely.

...

Well that escalated quickly.

...

Her father looks alarmed, and the glasses shimmer covers his eyes entirely. Then, his voice becomes almost robotically emotionless as he tells her that she doesn't have the hardware required for a full human consciousness upload. She replies that she does, and gestures to the Navi that she's transformed into an expansionist Giger monster. "A Psyche chip?" he guesses, after claiming not to know what one was just earlier this episode. She smiles and nods. "Don't worry," she assured him, "I'm still me." He says he's not so sure, and walks out.

I don't think that that was actually a conversation between Lain and her father. On either side. At best, Lain and her father got a few words and meaningful glances in edgewise.

Anyway, the entity that is trying to prevent Lain from being assimilated by a rival but also doesn't want to antagonize that rival too much withdraws the thing that used to be Lain's dad from the room. The entity assimilating Lain turns her back to her Navi, and she continues researching the Knights.

Along with various other bits of random online conversation she overhears, Lain learns that the Knights are not actually an organization, but a memeplex. An informational entity that spreads through the Wired, like a religion with its own agency.

So, that's at least one of the assimilating entities. The Knights. It may or may not be subservient to another entity that its constituents refer to as their god, though that god could also just be the Knights entity itself.

Of course, Lain might not actually belong to the Knights. It's pretty clear at this point that there are a bunch of these things. The Knights could be the one that's gotten her, or it could be a friend, foe, or unrelated to it.

As she researches/mindmelds, she sees some red laser pointers playing across the ceiling of her bedroom. She looks outside, and sees those cyber-cyclopes with their black car outside the house, staring up at her window.

I'm guessing these guys are either vessels of another entity and those things they wear on their heads are cybernetic control implants that give it greater fine manipulation over them, or they're free humans and those headsets are to protect them from the basilisk hacks that the entities use.

Lain is frightened at first, but then her expression turns to rage. "Go away," she shouts at them through the window. When they don't respond, she repeats it louder and angrier, and then causes one of their headsets to self destruct. The man clutches his exposed eyes and forehead in pain, and they retreat to their vehicle and speed off.

As Lain stares after them, her Navi's synthesized voice reports that the intruder has been repelled.

Immune response successful. All units, return to previous activity cycles. End episode.

This kind of feels more like an end to the story rather than a midpoint. It was good, but I'm not sure how the story is going to continue after this point.

While I could be totally off in my interpretations of what's going on, it definitely seems that Lain is no longer a character with agency. If I'm not totally off in my interpretations, then it's possible that MOST of the people we've been following are no longer characters with agency. A show about cyberdemons positioning their appendages against each other isn't really a story I can get invested in.

Since we're only four episodes into a 13 part series, I have to assume that something will reinject humanity into the story. I doubt it really is going to just be 9 more episodes of hive mind monsters doing incomprehensible shit at each other. But who will our protagonist(s) be? Does Lain even still exist at this point, or is she as a raindrop fallen into a lake? I guess next episode will have to at least start answering that question, or else shift to a totally different main character.

This was the most effectively horrifying episode so far. Not because of anything Lain did, but because of how simultaneously subtle and fast the assimilation seems to have been. We were watching her all along, but we still didn't know she was subsumed until well after the fact.

I guess the question this line of thought (again, assuming I'm not completely misinterpreting everything) leads me to is "should I actually be sad for Lain?" Is losing your individuality actually a loss? For all we can tell, Lain might legitimately be better off as what she is now. Maybe it's just our primitive biological wiring that makes this seem horrifying. Maybe the best possible future for humanity is letting something like this eat us.

Of course, maybe something already has. We'd be the lasts to know.