Do you remember their names? The GIRLS who she was friends with? I don't really recall them. They're between places more or less... It's difficult to recal. Were they even really all that important?

At least I remember Alice. Down down down to wonderland she goes. Why didn't she go to wonderland? Why didn't she follow Lain?

The Wired. That interconnected span of Navies and all the users who've stepped through their Navi-screens. And Lain of course. Lain.exe. The program and goddess of the wired, the harbringer of beautiful DISTORTION as she tears the barrier between both worlds apart. Should she have defied that programming given to her by that lesser god? What is Lain after all? Before godhood she was a little girl who'd killed herself and kept going. They say she's a program, but what about her body? Is she a program installed into flesh? How do you do that?

Hey, have you heard?

The greater world, the real world, has all it's news and publications, and the Wired as it bleeds into reality has what reality has always had. RUMORS. Twitching and writing as it slips between mouths, as it rots and mutates between minds. Just the whisper of a notion, an idea someone had, not confirmed just assumed. It's a match in a paper forest.

Publications and publics, content and audience. News. Stuff. Information. It's like Music, like notes on a mad musician's masterpiece, the cacopany of sounds overlapping eachother crashing into eachother, coliding like waves upon the rocks. At least it was. Tt's too much now. there's no silence.
There's so much of it. All this... stuff It's practically perverse with all this access. INFORNOGRAPHY practically. A swathe of news, a swathe of concepts, of opinions and perspectives. Waves of hate, of anguish. Everything. All of the time. Forever. What happens if we let go?

What happns if we merge; become one. What happens if we can never escape? Is it too late to try? Is it too late to escape?

Lain, Have you executed your processes at last?

The word ego is pretty odd, don'tcha think? It's something we typically associate with an overinflated sense of self; "a big ego" as they do love to say. In Ursula K. Le Guin's book The Disposessed, it takes on a different negative role in the line "don't egoize" that is often thrown about. To children largely. A scolding that's compared to "be quiet!" on that capitalist planet Anarres. And it's in that planetary comparison, that line drawn, theorized between a capitalist individualist planet, compared to it's anarchistic, collectivistic moon. We think that it's that moon, Anarres that is a utopia, but they so lack the chance to really act on their own terms, constantly pressured and shunned by their greater communities to act within laws silently devised and pinned in place. Though they refute their government, they still bear a government of the people. And like all governments, it restricts the people it holds. "Don't egoize" don't be yourself. Don't do things that contradict larger societal standards. Don't be your self. Kill your EGO