A PS1 Video Game and Anime Series from 1998 exploring the life of 14 year old Lain Iwakura and her interaction with the growing network of the Wired and her strange exellence at navigating it, as well as her place within it. The story explores themes of reality, identity, connection and communication through it's two key mediums, commenting on the incoming digital era that was beginning to emerge in the late 90's

A 14 year old girl, and the main character from the PS1 game and anime; Serial Experiments: Lain. While a normal girl initially, albeit one isolated from her friends at school and struggling with her disinterested and distant family members, upon connecting to the wired Lain discovers her nature as a sentient navi program placed in a human body meant to destroy the boundaries between the wired and the real world. She also discovers that she may be the true god of the wired as she usurps the previous false god of the Wired, Masami Eri Finally while the PS1 videogame ends with Lain killing herself, the Anime showcases a slightly older Lain which can be seen as Lain being placed in a new body or restarting the world as she does at the end of the anime, thanks to the world's connection with the wired and Lain's control over the wired.

The internet within the world of Serial Experiments, more remenicient of the internet in the 90s in its lack of common navigation websites. The wired also has connections to people's consciousnesses, achived through an explotiation of the Schumann Resonances and additional code added to the Latest Protocol of the wired. As the anime progresses this connection grows stronger, allowing Lain to interact with human subconsciousness through her access to the Wired.

The internet within the world of Serial Experiments, more remenicient of the internet in the 90s in its lack of common navigation websites. The wired also has connections to people's consciousnesses, achived through an explotiation of the Schumann Resonances and additional code added to the Latest Protocol of the wired. As the anime progresses this connection grows stronger, allowing Lain to interact with human subconsciousness through her access to the Wired.

The God of the Wired, Masami Eri is the designer of the Wire's latest protocol, protocol 7, who had added code into the protocol in secret while he worked at Tachibana General Laboratories, a stunt that got him fired and killed. Despite this, his extra code allowed him to control the protocol at will and to connect the consciousness to the wired, beginning to blur the line between the wired and reality. It's thanks to this extra code that Masami Eri was able to live on through the Wired, and become it's god. As a god, Masami claims to have made Lain and given her a body from which she can interact with and experience the real world before uniting it with the Wired. By the end of the anime, however, Masami Eri is exposed by Lain as a man playing god with his backend access to the internet.