Serial Experiments Lain/WMG

Serial Experiments Lain

Alternate Technology History

The computers are called Navis because it's short for Knowledge NAVIgator--you can see a little animation of this in episode ten, if I recall.

"Knowledge Navigator" is an imaginary class of computer that (former Apple CEO) John Sculley wrote a book about. The concept has informed a lot of what Apple has done with the iPad, and the computers in Serial Experiments Lain seem to act a lot like these.

The computer corporation is called "tachibana" which is a type of orange, just to avoid trademark issues with Apple.

So in the Lain 'verse, Apple is all computers.

This might help to explain why Lain, a virtual entity with supposedly rather indirect control over the physical world (if Masami Eiri is to be believed), might nonetheless be able to pull off a Ret-Gone: she has a posse. The Cult of Apple is a literal cult in the Lain 'verse. (Maybe the same people as the Knights? Anyway, point is they will do what she says.) They don't have much resource to work with under normal circumstances, but in the modern world most money exists as numbers in databases, and that's exactly the sort of thing Lain would have been able to acquire.

So she actually just paid someone else to "erase" her from history. This might not even be that hard given the curious effects that Accella has on people. The poor guy who takes it in episode two is able to look at Lain and immediately know exactly who she is--because Accella patches him into the Wired, and without the need for the enormous intrusive interface that Lain sets up in her room. It may not be very good access to the Wired, but that elementary ability to put thoughts in people's heads could be very handy if you need, e.g., to brainwash someone into thinking they are actually the same Chisa Yomoda who committed suicide last year.

Lain is the manifestation of our collective subconscious

Lain is the manifestation of our collective subconscious. She's fragmented into different aspects of ourselves that we suppress: there's the child-like Lain, the bold Lain, the evil Lain, and others. Certain engineers tuned the protocols and hardware running the Wired so that it would allow information to cross to and from our collective subconscious, which had the effect of allowing the waiting Lain/collective unconscious to form a more conscious entity. Masami Eiri's goal was the reverse: to infiltrate the collective unconscious from the Wired.

Meanwhile, the child-like Lain desired a family so she created one, the bold Lain hung around Cyberia and had fun, and the evil Lain spied on people to learn their secrets. The child-like Lain saw the pain that she (in her various forms) was causing Arisu, and decided that humanity's collective unconscious should not have such reckless power. So she rewrote history and altered the protocol so that it can't interface with humanity's collective unconscious.

At the end of the series, it's implied that Lain has killed a lot of people -- definitely the two Men in Black, probably all of the Knights, and possibly a large number of people; it's only certain that she didn't kill Arisu. The KIDS experiment, years earlier, caused the exact same thing to happen: it empowered a collective unconscious on a much smaller scale, whose various incarnations ran amok and killed all the test subjects.

And therefore, millenia ago on a distant planet...

The same thing killed the Krynn in Forbidden Planet

Just like a collective subconscious killed the KIDS subjects, the Krynn built a Wired and their collective unconscious wiped them all out. The just had much more powerful psi amplifiers than we did.

The same thing killed / instrumentalized all of humanity in Neon Genesis Evangelion

This theory was inspired by the similarity of Freudian (which influenced Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Jungian (which influenced Serial Experiments Lain) theories of psychoanalysis. In fact, Jung himself was influenced by Freud. How did it take place, anyway? In the world of Eva, the collective unconscious was personified in the form of Adam and the Angels, which humanity / the Lilim are trying to repress (lampshaded by the Angels' Mind Rape abilities, and the canonical fact that the Angels are the alternate evolutions of Humanity). Seele's real intention was to create the Wired, and alter it so that the collective unconscious can be manifested into a conscious entity where humanity can deal with them physically. Basically, a huge ritual of psychoanalysis. Gendo is Eiri, both wanting the physical man to penetrate the collective subconscious, causing the death of all humanity just like the KIDS Experiment.

After Lain Ret Conned herself out of existence, the world of Code Geass takes place

Charles was trying to replicate what Eiri wanted, to take control of the collective unconscious. C.C. and Lain are also the same entity.

The Wired, is in fact, All The Tropes Wiki.

The Wired is a hive mind made through connecting humanity's psychic powers via the Internet. Wait, how come the connection of humans create a Deus Est Machina? In other fiction, beings wired together (for example, the Borg) don't produce an instant Deus Est Machina. Where is the real Deus Est Machina, then? Answer: All The Tropes Wiki. Think about it: Tropes transcend reality. Enough tropes can either ruin your life or strip a human away of your Fourth Wall. Enough humans without a Fourth Wall could outsmart, or even transcend and manipulate, reality. Enough humans with enough tropes to transcend reality can make a God.

Eiri knew, that the simple wiring of humans, will just make them too cold and rational to prevent creation of a God. After all, machines are built to be logical. Too much irrationality (for example, Religion), will prevent humans from merging with the Wired, and too much rationality will prevent the existence of Gods. To allow this, he broke down the cold rationality that is so characteristic of the Internet through the Tropes, which are irrational enough to break the Fourth Wall yet logical enough to allow existence with the Wired.

Lain is a bank account cracker.

By the end of the series, Lain has somehow crammed an entire network site on her bedroom, complete with 19 inch racks, professional-grade switches and routers that must very likely support advanced stuff like port aggregation, Spanning Tree, linkstate routing, DHCP and whatnot, maybe 4 servers, 3 computers, most likely a super-fast Internet connection plugged directly to the carrier, and on top of that, she even has a neural interface on her computer. Although her site is rather small compared to an university network site, it's still really huge, and chances are it would cost like $70,000 dollars!

Therefore, in order to fund her purchases, Lain works as a freelance hacker and secretly steals money from bank accounts. As a result, the authorities eventually found her and figured out who she was -- which is why The Men in Black are always stalking her outside of her house.

• Didn't her overlooker/adoptive dad buy her all that stuff?
  • He just bought her the top of the line, but otherwise ordinary Navi. After Lain found the Psyche-processor and installed it, the rest of the stuff grew around it like vines. See how the machinery breaks through the house's wall in the later episodes, and how new wires spontaneously attach themselves to the house to provide electricity for it all. Serial Experiments Lain isn't science fiction, but Magical Realism.
    • Given the fact that Lain is god, her family is part of a secret orginization, another (possibly the same) orginization worships her as god, a demi-god looks over her, and she has superhuman/strange powers and a split personality, money was probably not an issue. She probably didn't even buy it, and instead it was delivered/was installed/just appeared out of the blue. The Psyche chip just showed up in her locker, and other things were left for her at Cyberia, so we know she was being fed equipment.
      • Futher, it could have been Eiri that was organizing her reception of all this in order to draw her closer to him and cut off her connections to the physical reality.
      • I always assumed the stuff left for her at Cyberia was from the mostly-independent Lain of the Wired, or something. The details are pretty much moot, however, the important part being that there's a couple of ways it could have happened, and it did happen.

Masami Eiri is actually the good guy, and most of the plot is the result of a huge Gambit Roulette by him

If I was going to use spoiler-tags, I'd have to cover the whole thing with them; but seriously, why are you looking at the Wild Mass Guessing page if you haven't already watched the show? All the same, Here there be spoilers. ARRR!

God/Masami Eiri wasn't the one who gave Lain a body; Lain of the Wired did it herself, as part of a ploy to become God of the real world and the Wired. In essence, Evil Lain is the real Lain of the Wired, and, already omnipresent and omnipotent within the confines of the Wired, created Real Lain in order to break down the barrier and complete her apotheosis. Eiri used Protocol 7 to upload his consciousness in order to stop her from accomplishing this, teaching her by example that no one should wield that kind of power. By accomplishing his own pseudo-apotheosis, Eiri is able to figure out the details of her plan, and generally engineer things so that Real Lain subsumes her Wired counterpart, and reverses the plan already set in motion by resetting reality to just before the point where she became Real, at which point the new dominant Lain chose not to create herself and to remain as a distributed presence in the Wired.

Arisu/Alice is the hinge on which this all turns. Lain of the Wired was simultaneously completely connected in terms of information, yet completely disconnected in terms of emotion and human interaction. Eiri, using his vast reach as God, engineered events so that Lain would come to have a true friend, and her final decision to execute the all-reset was catalyzed by her genuine love for Arisu. The Power of Love was enough for this Lain to overpower the other Lains, and as the new dominant personality she used her power to undo the general badness her original self had set into motion. Furthermore, by learning that it's best to just watch and only occasionally (and subtly) intervene, I propose that Lain went on to become God from Futurama as well. Hey, why not?

Finally, Eiri did all this knowing that Lain was going to ultimately hit the master reset, and that he himself wouldn't die. It's like the ending to Donnie Darko, only weirder and more ambiguous. Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd compose.

• You... actually understood what the heck was going on?!
• My God...the series actually makes sense now.
• Thank you for helping to clarify this for me. However, Eiri's behaviour in episode 11, when Arisu/Alice finally goes to lain's house. His freak out over Lain's decision doesn't strike me as particularly heroic, especially if he knew that her meddling would wipe him out of existence. Still, it's good to keep your points in mind; they're by far the most coherent explanation I've yet to get about this series.
• Interesting interpretation, but still not without problems, if taken as a viable theory for what the hell is going on, rather than simple WMG. Namely, that Lain of the Wired isn't evil - she is just Lain's assertive, bold side, free from the social repression. The crazy Lain is yet another personality, and possibly not a true reflection of Lain at all, but a creation of the collective perception of Lain in the Wired: a creepy urban legend come to life.

Serial Experiments Lain is a sequel to Suzumiya Haruhi and Lain is Haruhi

The events of the series occur after Haruhi realizes she's essentially God and rewrites reality- it's why it takes place in the present day...present time HA HA HA HA yet technology is more akin to Twenty Minutes Into The Future.

• Or vice-versa?
• If Lain is Haruhi, then the Wired is the Integrated Data Thought Entity, and Yuki works for Eiri.
• Lain does look like a cross between Haruhi and Yuki....

"Suzumiya Haruhi" is a sequel to Serial Experiments Lain and Haruhi is Lain

I think this makes more sense than the reverse. At the end, Lain is lonely. To alleviate her loneliness (years spent observing humanity without interacting) she wills herself into human form and suppresses her powers and memories. Two caveats:

• All versions of Lain/Haruhi are present: the child Lain (distant and bored), the bold Lain (creates the club), and the evil Lain (gets a computer)
• She only shut of conscious access to her powers, her subconscious can access her powers

The "reset" chronology is that of our world.

Not too wild, I think -- my idea is that Lain does take place in the "present day, present time" but in an alternate chronology where technology happened to have developed a little earlier due to Lain's influence. Once Lain removes herself from the timeline, the world is our world.

• The only problem with this is that they still have the strange cell-phones. Which is why they need to digitally edit all of them out after the reset. Because that would make the series 100000000000000x creepier.

Lain is an analogue for Jesus

... from a Gnostic perspective. Basically, the information in the Wired amalgamated into a benevolent Godlike entity. The entity is the "Lain" who is said to have always existed in the Wired. The God decided that in order to guide humanity, it needed a human perspective. It thus directed events to create a human-Wired interface, and the creation of an Artificial Human, all for the purposes of creating Lain. It set events in motion to ensure that Lain is eventually brought back to the Wired, learning much about herself as a human and humanity in general in the process, all for the purpose of reuniting Lain with God. Masami Eiri was directed to being a god for the purpose of teaching and guiding Lain (and acting as a Demiurge figure).

Lain is the first Digimon

Serial Experiments Lain and Digimon Tamers were both written by Chiaki J. Konaka. In Tamers, Digimon were artificial life programs that evolved within the Digital World, a parallel reality within Cyberspace. They developed the ability to "bio-emerge," manifesting as physical beings by synthesizing artificial proteins -- much like the way Lain's physical form was created using "artificial ribosomes" and the way Eiri attempted to manifest physically in the climax. The barriers between reality and the Digital World seem to be eroding, since there are portals that allow passage between the two realities.

Perhaps the world Lain created at the end of the series is the world of Digimon Tamers. Even though she removed herself from people's perception, the divine force/Jungian collective unconscious that she symbolizes is still present, as are the Schumann resonances that can tap into latent human psi abilities and bring about seemingly supernatural events. These psi abilities are strongest in children, which is why children have a special bond with Digimon. Somehow the Digimon artificial life programs, as they evolved, must have found a way to tap into these latent powers and thereby gain access to the real world. The Digital World is a name given to the domain within the Wired where the Digimon programs reside, or perhaps the Wired goes by a different name in this time/reality. Maybe the catalyzing force of digivolution that became Calumon (the non-evolving Digimon who enables other Digimon to digivolve) was created by Lain to counteract the destructive force of the D-Reaper, or is an aspect of Lain herself.

• One puzzle is that both realities have a Juri Kato, but the two characters are different. The Juri of Lain is a gregarious teenager with frizzy hair, while the Juri (Jeri in the English dub) of Tamers is a shy, straight-haired preteen who looks a bit like Lain (and is dubbed by the same actress in the English version). Of course, Kato is a common name and Juri, while not ubiquitous, is a valid given name in Japan, so it could simply be coincidence.

Lain offed herself, and was reborn as Rakka

Lain was a lonely, reclusive, insecure and confused girl who thought nobody would notice her disappearance — except for Alice, who was her only friend and stayed with her until the very last moment, even when finally confronting Masami Eiri. Despite this, she deleted herself from existence anyway. Lonely and without anyone to confide her secrets even after wiping her memory from everyone in the world, she offed herself. Since she killed herself, her presence in the Wired was no more, and thus she had essentially disappeared from the world. To redeem her soul from the sin of hurting Alice, she was reborn as a haibane -- as Rakka, that is.

Evidence supporting this claim is the fact that Lain looks like Rakka without wings and with shorter hair, and the fact that Yoshitoshi A Be was behind both productions.

• This troper would like to point out that A Be being behind both productions pretty much explains why Lain looks like Rakka. Hell, look at some of the art for Welcome to The NHK (the specific example I can think of is the novel's cover art, which is on the series' Wikipedia page), in which Misaki also looks very much like Lain. Either A Be is fond of drawing girls who look similar to Lain, or that's just the way he draws all his female leads, or both.
  • This is Wild Mass Guessing, however.
  • Abe can't really be considered as being "behind" both production. He conceived of and wrote Haibane Renmei, so it's definitely his. But Serial Experiments Lain was written by Chiaki Konaka. Abe was only brought in to the production after Ueda saw his artwork online. He did character designs and backgrounds, but that's it. If you look at the other teen female characters he's done, you'll see that they've all got similarities. He tends not to do the blue or pink hair and so forth, so this isn't too surprising.

This is the same world in which Paranoia Agent is set.

Why, pray tell? It has everything to do with the dead people. In episode 8 of Paranoia Agent, a group of people agree to commit suicide together as part of a pact they made online. At the end of the episode, we get a bit of a Tomato in the Mirror effect - they're already dead. Given how death works in the Wired of Lain's world, this should make sense.

Lain is Teddie in an alternate reality.

They both were born from their respective media, both of them were able to manifest in the real world, and the bear motif they share.

Lain is a tsukumogami of the modern era.

Bear with me folks, this is WMG. A tsukumogami is an object that inexplicably comes to life after it exists for a hundred years. The internet hasn't been around that long, obviously, but with so many people using it, the process may just be speeded up. Oftentimes in anime, tsukumogami create a human avatar, so there you go.

Lain is Shinji reincarnated.

Because somebody had to make this assumption soon enough.

Lain is an alternate universe Minus

They look similar, they have weird names, they both have few friends, there's the whole God thing and there's the whole weird things happening via them. Just in this universe, she's an Emotionless Girl in a Darker and Edgier world, and everything is more warped and strange. Though, I haven't really gone further than this part of the theory.

Serial Experiments Lain happens inside The Matrix

Both are based off Cyber-Magical Realism. And Lain might be the One of that time.....

Serial Experiments Lain happens during the Human Instrumentality Project

Except the Soul-Collecting Reis were turned into Soul-Collecting Lains.

• Lain can also be Shinji Ikari, since both were given control over Instrumentality.

Serial Experiments Lain happens in Real Life, Present Day, Present Time!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

• Let me explain. The anime gives references to the Internet, the Schumann Resonance (Earth's electromagnetic field) and man's ability to produce psychic power when wired together. Over time, as we are getting more and more addicted to technology, it influences the nature of Earth (from green nature utopia to a wired Crapsack World), so somehow we are either just complete jerks worshipping cyberspace, or somehow our psychic powers are being harnessed by cyberspace, giving it the ability to influence the world. The best example would be TV Tropes itself, which has the power to influence fiction even though it is just a wiki with over-the-top theories.
  • If SEL was real, then there would be the Eldritch Abomination that is Lain Iwakura, who is watching us masturbate.
    • Lain isn't real, since the Wired of Real Life is still too weak to invade human privacy directly (the internet still feeds on second-hand psionic power, NOT from living souls, and there's the problem about China). Cyberspace can influence matter and events, but not man's power of free will (unless somebody hacked China's great firewall and acquired massive psychic potential from the most populous people on earth....).
      • Cyberspace (Wired) doesn't just lack the ability to limit free will, in fact it gives man too much free will......
      • That would be a perfect example of limiting human free will. That multiple people assume the same behaviour-pattern out of perceived sense of anonymity is a demonstration of how the loss of self-identity can cause people to act more like a Jerkass collective than individuals in control of themselves.

SEL takes place in the same world as The World Ends With You.

• Layer 5 is particularly full of parallels. "God" sounds like the Composer. The "prophecy" written in red ink is talking about the Game. The weird ghost people Lain keeps seeing are Players. The person who got run over in Shibuya was Shiki, and she ended up in the Game (as did Chisa and the girl who got run over by a train in the first episode). Hell, maybe Mika actually died in this episode and gave her sanity as an entry fee into the Game, which she lost, but she was then returned to reality after the end of TWEWY.
  • Also, Imprinting is a technique derived from the Wired, and JJ is actually BJ, who actually shows part of his face when he's off-duty. He met the other Def Märch guys in Cyberia.
  • Any which way, Lain ends up either a Composer or even a full-fledged Angel, and Joshua hates her.

Doctor Who is what happens when Lain gets bored.

It explains a lot... the inside of the TARDIS is inside the Wired. It doesn't really time travel, that's just Lain continually resetting the world. And Lain is all of the Time Lords; each version of the Doctor is just Lain through the eyes of the current companion. And she's the Daleks. All of them. And every other recurring character with the possible exception of the various companions... the Master, for example, is Evil Lain...

Lain is in fact, Ceiling Cat, or some other Lolcat

The proof: Evil Lain actually watched Arisu masturbate.

The WMG: The real Big Bad of the entire plot isn't Eiri, but Anonymous, being the dominant I Am Legion entity that he is. Lain might be the collective anthropomorphic manifestation of Anonymous' own creation, the Lolcats. Obviously, Lain, who actually watched Arisu masturbate and is also the God of the Wired, is Ceiling Cat. In the SEL Universe, Eiri is a member of Anonymous. Consumed by the power of the GIFT, he tried to use both his psychological knowledge of the collective unconscious and his knowledge with computers to access the collective unconscious and personify it into Lain / Ceiling Cat. Through Lain / Ceiling Cat, they will preach the message of anonymity, and maketh anonymous disciples of all nations. However, Lain sacrificed herself to forgive our sins and prevent the awakening of Anonymous from the nether abyss. If Eiri and Anonymous succeeded, however, through the collective unconscious Eiri will awaken Anonymous from his abyssal slumber as a group of anonymous kids over Four Chan into an actual Legion of Demonic Invaders from Hell who will purge the world with fire, brimstone and endless memes and can only be identified and expected through this quote: I Am Legion, For We Are, Many........

Most of the entire series is a hallucination by Chisa Yomoda

Chisa Yomoda encountered Lain, who was never real in the real world, while she was in the Wired. Lain teased her to near-suicide. Chisa then hallucinated what would happen if she commited suicide and if Lain was real, but decided not to go through with it. She then went back into the wired after school the next day, encountered Lain, and gave her a stern talking to. She also said that the real world is better than the Wired, so Lain decided to come to the real world and see for herself

Deus Ex Machina - Your literal God From The Machine

This is less of a WMG than it is a hypothetical elaboration. However, it has both insanity and a mass of words, so I'm putting it here.

Warning: what follows is... a somewhat solid text wall, complete with punctuation, far too many brackets, and a wanton abuse of the word "reality" for mortar. Please ignore at your own discretion.

Lain's presence was a bridging that allowed the superimposition of the Wired over Reality, breaking down of the barriers between the human mind and, essentially, a dispersed neurological interface on a macroscopic level, defined by the flow of information (as is the human mind). When those walls broke down, it allowed individual minds to impose their subjective reality (defined by their identity) onto the subjective realities of others, creating realities that deferred from the objective norm while subverting the associated interfacing flow of information to project it to a different end than what would have originally occurred without the interference. "God is in the Wired" is the idea that a persistent and large enough influence over the flow of information that composes the macroscopic network, will cause it to change in flow, and hence change the nature of the interfaces of those involved/linked to the network, influencing the aforementioned sentient entity on the receiving end. Hence, with the same conditions, if one individual can project a persistent subjective reality, e.g. "I, [Insert Name Here] am God", then eventually, through the superimposition of realities upon one another and their constant two-way pooling (i.e. information is both given and received simultaneously without a filter or seive (such as a barrier) to contain or regulate the interaction), individuals will come to believe that the original perpetrator, [Insert Name Here], of the idea/information is in fact a God (because all subjective reality has been re-defined/influenced to that end. Now in normal circumstances, if something caused a group of people to believe that someone else was a religious figure etc., it wouldn't have the ability to impact upon what you could call "physical" reality. However as we saw with the KIDS experiment, the psychic power inherent in transmission of electrical impulses (as in information) within the brain can achieve a change in physical reality through the release/transformation of that energy. In a reality where the borders between the Wired and Reality are lost, the transmission of information becomes a dominant overlay superimposed onto physical quantities (with both microscopic and macroscopic neurologics/networks combining), such that when there is no barrier between the Wired and Reality, manipulation of physical matter becomes subject to the influence/control of the transfer of information (now become an open application of energy upon the state of matter at a nuclear level). (As to this last part, you can take either the idea that: the mass energy in information transfer, in both the human brain and in the network of the Wired, is applied to matter by the driving force applied by said energy, configuring matter into a state constant with the configuration of the energy-flux of information-interchange; or use the philosophical cross theoretical physics idea that because an objective is determined by consensus and hence, as, according to a very simplified version of Shroedinger's Cat with the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in that: the universe consists of infinitely possible quanta in the infinite probabilities of an event occurring as determined by quantum waveform, - however when we measure or observe a definite aspect of quanta and to evaluate it in discrete form, this causes wavefunction collapse where the probabilities of any other form for the quanta fall to zero, and the quanta is defined by the aspect observed (i.e. there are multitudes of probabilities until a definite action is observed/measured, at which point the wavefunction is reduced to one single eigenstate), - and hence if a pervasive reality is determined to be observed via consensus, you could probably bastardize this idea to the conclusion that waveform collapse occurs as all possibilities are reduced to 0 upon the defining measurement of a perceptive reality, but I don't know if that isn't bending the rules just a little too much).

As a result, Lain originates from the Wired, its Avatar/goddess pulled into being by the development of the Wired into manifest sentience. The Wired shows enough similarities with organic neurological systems to be capable of sentience, and since it interfaces constantly with humans (by which it is defined, the product of the manifest is human. Mostly. She is literally God From the Machine (Deus Ex Machina).

Due to the merging of the Wired and the Real World, she has become a physical god in the combination of both realities. Hence she becomes almost a guardian, watching to prevent leakage between the two, reinforcing barriers that she herself installed. Or maybe she is just reinforcing the idea that the worlds are separate until humans can actually deal with something that pretty much amounts to a collective consciousness. In any case, because the Reset is her creation, she becomes a creator god in her own right.

Eiri Tries To Cause The Singularity

The Level 7 Protocol (which sounds almost like a thinly-veiled analogue of the TCP/IP stack, hypothesizing what TCP/IP v7 might be) blurred the borders between The Wired and real life. Lain was created to simultaneously carry the protocol in her head and also to act as a messiah to the merging of reality and The Wired. This is literally shown with the kids holding their arms up in the street to accept the "rapture" of Cloud God Lain In The Sky. While Lain is a created entity, living humans could transcend into The Wired and reach a singularity if they were to accept it (Eiri's plan all along). It all went badly when Lain rejected godhood and pushed the big reset button because she just wanted to live as a normal girl.

Lain is Haruhi is Shinji

After erasing herself from existence, Lain became Haruhi by locking away conscious memory of her powers and reinventing her personality. Haruhi, in turn, despairing at how ordinary the world seemed to her, imagined herself as a warped savior of humanity -- that is, Shinji -- and subconsciously made it into reality. However, Lain herself was an image of Shinji as he saw himself during Instrumentality. This causal paradox is fundamental to the existence of the universe; all of reality is an extension of Lain/Haruhi/Shinji. The Time Lords are people who understand how this works.

Lain is connected to the plots of both Steins;Gate and Haruhi Suzumiya

WARNING: CONTAINS UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR BOTH STEINS;GATE AND THE SUZUMIYA HARUHI NOVELS

It hit me when I remembered how Okabe got his Reading Steiner: when he was a child, he became ill to the point of death, and the side-affects he was feeling then are the same ones he felt whenever a timeline changes. Now think back to how Nagato was at the beginning of Novel 10: really, really sick, due to Kuyou's viral attack against her. Now Lain is the closest equivalent to a data-entity in her own world; now, what if being in the Wired connected you to different timelines and different universes? If that were the case, then it hit me: Okabe received his Reading Steiner form Lain! Going further, I deduced that how Okabe received Reading Steiner was the same way Haruhi and Sasaki got their powers. As to why Lain did this, I cannot figure out, though...