Serial Experiments Lain E8: “Rumors”

July 7, 2020.

7:26 PM, GMT.

Hah, hah, hah.

This episode's opening voiceover is in a quieter whisper than usual, and includes the words "Do you want to be hurt too? Do you want your heart to feel like it's being scraped with a rasp? If you do, don't look away, whatever you do." I guess we can expect a Red Wedding in this episode, then. Thanks for the warning.

After the title card, we open on a kid playing a VR game that involves desolate landscapes and giant, ridiculous Final Fantasy-esque swords. Is that the pervy elf boy? I think that's him. Yup, it's him! Lain is remotely asking him what he knows about Rudolph, and he's telling her to wait until he beats this next opponent. Lain doesn't feel like humoring him, and just manifests in the game and tells him that it's a dumb game and she's impatient.

Elf kid just whines at her about how no, she just doesn't get this game. We then jump to Lain consulting another Wired friend who hangs out in a surreal fetish chat and speaks through a surreal pole dancer avatar. She's asking him about Tachibana General Labs, and he tells her that they're a major corporation so they wouldn't be doing anything illegal.

...

That 90’s naivete.

...

He has heard rumors, though. As the Wired gets bigger and heavier, the internet provider technology has been struggling to keep up with demands. Someone has been sabotaging new high speed IP research, and Tachibana is suspected. No one knows why.

At a guess, based on what we learned last episode, the Tachibana guys know that higher capacity internet would make it easier for the Knights etc to feed everyone's brains to Rudolph etc, and are thus trying to impede it.

Next, in what I thiiiiink is meatspace, Lain enters the upstairs hallway to find her sister standing by the window, shivering and stammering to herself all alone. Lain asks her if she's okay, and gets only a terrified-looking stare in response.

Lain's own passively miserable reaction to this suggests that she's in clonked-on-the-head-amnesiac mode. Possibly at the same time that her other self is playing detective in the Wired.

Next, she drifts downstairs to the kitchen/living room setup, where the news is on silent and her parents are sitting next to each other in front of an empty table and staring down at it like corpses.

Lain pauses at this for a short moment before walking past them to get herself a drink of what looks like tea from the refrigerator. There's no milk in it. None. This must be the next stage of assimilation after having too much. She then addresses her parents, and they neither move nor speak in response. After a moment's wait, she tries again, and tells them that someone recently asked her if her parents were actually her real parents, pretty funny huh? Again, no response. They might as well be dummies. Neither of them move a muscle. Tears start coming to Lain's eyes as she repeats the question, more desperately, and still might as well be talking to a pair of still images.

Then there's a jump cut (which I know not to trust at this point) to Lain, no longer crying, washing her cup and putting it away. She turns around again, and is startled to see that her parents are now frozen in a different position, with a different facial expression directed right at her.

O...kay...this is just starting to feel like second rate creepypasta material tbh.

This disconcerting but mostly just confounding scene continues in silence for a while. Lain sees her father blink, so they're not frozen in time or the like; just not able or willing to move beyond the absolute tiniest amount, or acknowledge her in any supportive or even human way.

This is a perfect time to end the scene and cut away to school the next morning.

As Lain walks up to the building, Arisu taps her on the shoulder. Lain turns around and greets her, but sees Arisu and the other girls just staring at her with this accusatory glare. Motionless enough that I thought this was a repeat of last night's Parental Paralysis Syndrome for a moment before Arisu corrects me by opening her mouth and asking Lain if she was the one who "did it." Let me guess, someone cut the school watermain open with an ax and painted the words "they made me do it" in a giant creepy font all over the wall. Lain doesn't know what they're talking about, because she doesn't know anything in this persona, and it takes some convincing but finally Arisu at least accepts that Lain really doesn't know.

Just then, a shiny red car comes in through the school driveway. The man in it...I thought he looked like the rich guy we saw in his office very briefly that one time, but I think he's older? Not sure who this guy is, or if we've seen him before.

Upon seeing his car arrive, Arisu runs away in fear. Not Lain. Arisu, the ostensibly normal one. The other girls run after her to ask wtf. Lain remains behind and stares into space.

Later, in class, Lain is once again accessing the Wired on her tablet thingy during a lecture. Her other, more aggressive and canny, self appears in a spooky boardroom where mouth-creatures are all arguing and yelling at each other about all the weird and creepy events that have been plaguing the Wired and adjacent parts of meatspace recently.

Lain listens to them with growing irritation before telling them all to shut up. They do...but not in the regular way. The mouths keep flapping, but it's like the volume has been turned off, and then one, singular voice speaks over the silence, accompanied by that ominous semi-religious music. It asks Lain if she was looking for him, and...oh, right, this is the God voice from when he addressed her directly on the street a few eps ago. The difference being that now he's talking to Aggressive Lain instead of Amnesia Lain.

Alright. This side of Lain is able to not only resist Rudolph, but even confront him!

Rudolph might have explicitly referred to himself as God before, but now he's getting mealy-mouthed about what exactly godhood means. He says that he didn't create the world, nor does he have absolute control of it. However, he does have the "omniscience" aspect of the triple-O god. He is ubiquitous within the wired, and can reach beyond it a little, but his power over the physical world remains very limited. She asks him who or what he really is, and he claims to be her. The "her" walking around in meatspace is just a small extension of the greater Lain entity.

Which um. Doesn't explain why he'd have reached out and addressed her like that, back in his first speaking appearance.

Is this going to be a cyber-wogdat situation? Is this prick Lain's higher internet soul?

...actually, now that I'm thinking of it in those terms, yeah that tracks. Amnesain is an empty shell. It knows who it is, and has basic emotions, but minimal personality or proactivity. Agressain is the healthiest and most normal seeming part of her, the bulk of what we'd normally recognize as a "person." And then there's Rudolph. So, Amnelain is kind of like Alphonse's organic body while her "soul" is off having adventures in the Wired (from which it returns only rarely), and then Rudolph is the gloating, glowing prick that condescends at its other selves.

Of course, that's all assuming that Rudolph isn't just lying and trying to confuse her. That's also quite possible.

In meatspace, Lain looks up from her tablet and finds the whole classroom frozen in place and staring at her accusingly, just like her parents. Not responding to anything she says or does.

She flees the room, and out in the hall she finds the same thing. Both in the halls, and outside in the courtyard. The only movements are the others moving their heads to follow her, and even that they only do when Lain's back is turned.

It doesn't stop. She tries to text Arisu to ask her what she was asking her about that morning, but gets no response. Lain runs outside, sits in a crook of the building, curls up, and starts crying, asking over and over what she could have possibly done in the Wired. What she could have been doing in the Wired, and for how long.

It seems like Amlain is still in the body, but she's remembering at least the basics of Aglain's conversation with Rudolph. How separate are the two, really? Or...the three? However many of her there actually are?

After a few minutes, Arisu texts her back.

That's reassuring. Maybe. I think? Which rumors? What is she even being accused of?

A slow motion incendiary blast scours the scene, and Lain is suddenly standing up and walking through it. Then everything goes back and a digital "searching..." message pops up. Then we see Arisu being strangled...raped?...oh wait, no, she's apparently in the foreplay stage of consensual sex with that guy who drove up to the school before. Who we now learn is a teacher.

Then, she suddenly notices Lain sitting in a weird Lotus-ish position on her bed, watching with a maniacal grin. And then, with a crosscut to Lain's vantage point, we see that Arisu is sitting at the desk of her own bedroom, with no one else there besides herself and Lain.

Um...were Arisu and the teacher having cybersex or something? I don't see a Navi or a tablet or anything in front of Arisu, but that doesn't always seem to matter anymore. Maybe?

Grinning demon Lain cackles out what sounds like quotes from somewhere. Rumors. Kids gossiping about Arisu lusting after one of her teachers. Arisu freaks out, and asks if it really was Lain who started those rumors. Lain just keeps grinning and cackling. She further accuses Lain of having sat invisibly in her bedroom and watched her sexual fantasies without permission for some time. Lain laughs harder.

Cut to Lain laying in bed in her own room, gagging in either pain or fear, while lightning crackles back and forth along the phone lines outside. Her borg techno-hive is still intact from the looks of it, so I guess the bombing didn't happen, or hasn't happened yet, or has been erased from the timeline by internet magic. There's a montage of city lights, Lain floating through a vortex of thrashing wires, random flashes, and then Lain turning into a giantess made of blood-filled shadows. And, then, Aglain is confronting Trollain over her terrible malicious act of...um...telepathically snooping on Arisu's sex fantasies and then spreading internet rumors about them with no even hypothetical incident to point to as evidence, I guess.

On one hand, that's fairly true to life for internet harassment campaigns. On the other, Arisu actually having those fantasies seems almost irrelevant in that case.

Aglain denounces Trollain. Trollain just laughs harder. Even when Aglain starts strangling her, uncaring of the fact that she might literally be attempting suicide. She's more disturbed by the fact that she can feel Trollain's body heat than any such possibility.

Trollain, while being choked, taunts Aglain over her not knowing which of them is the real Lain. Aglain screams. Bloody shadow giant Lain also screams.

Then Aglain is back in the conversation with Rudolph, surrounded by babbling mouth creatures. Except, now Rudolph has manifested as a gelatinous silver blob hovering in the air beside her, and the babbling rumormongers now have faces. Well, a face.

Rudolph tells her that everyone on the Wired is her. She exists wherever any user is logged in (and seemingly even when they aren't). Every communication passing through the phone cords and airwaves is just a signal flashing between two of her neurons. And, he says, it has always been this way.

That could mean that the network-entity has always existed even before it attached itself to Lain, that Lain has always had a mystical link to the proto-Wired, that time is getting all screwy again, or just that Rudolph is full of it.

Aglain is going with that last hypothesis for now.

Rudolph insists that he's telling the truth, and that Lain has listened in on everyone's secrets and private thoughts and told everyone else about them all. He also claims that it was right of her to do so, because the network needs to assimilate more data, and circulating everything contained in any and all of its constituent brains is progress toward that goal.

I get the feeling that Rudolph isn't actually part of Lain. Rather, he's an external entity that's using her to create an omni-assimilating worldbrain for himself to exploit or inhabit. Maybe.

Aglain says that that's bullshit. She's aware of her own existence. She has clear memories of where she was at all the times that "she" was allegedly doing insane Wired shit. She then makes an assertion that I don't follow at all: if she really was responsible for spreading Arisu's teacher fantasies around for all to know about, she should also delete that information from everyone's brains. Because, as we all know, once something has been circulated around the internet, it's the easiest thing in the world to make it disappear again.

Rudolph tells her to try and see if she can do that. And, well. She does it.

Flash back to school that (next?) morning. Arisu and the others are running excitedly toward Lain, greeting her warmly. And, as Aglain watches, brand new character Perkylain erupts out of her body and runs forward to meet them, running off to class giggling alongside them while leaving Aglain alone and unnoticed in the courtyard.

Arisu briefly remarks on Lain's behavior being unusual for her, but quickly gets used to it. Aglain is left in the dust, unseen and unheard, as the school grounds turn into a white void that the group disappears into.

Trollain appears out of nowhere and tells her that "Lain is Lain, and I'm me" before disappearing again.

Then Lain is back in her unbombed room, still full of bizarre machinery and holograms. She asks her Navi if there are more than one of her, and gets no answer. The end.


Analysis for this episode...sorry, I've got nothing.