Lain lives with her middle-class family, which consists of her inexpressive older sister Mika, her emotionally distant mother, and her computer-obsessed father. Lain herself is somewhat awkward, introverted, and socially isolated from most of her school peers, but the status-quo of her life becomes upturned by a series of bizarre incidents which start to take place after she learns that girls from her school have received an e-mail from Chisa Yomoda, a schoolmate who had committed suicide. When Lain receives the message herself at home, Chisa tells her that she is not dead, but has merely "abandoned her physical body and flesh", and is alive deep within the virtual reality-world of the Wired itself where she has found the almighty and divine God. From this point, Lain is caught up in a series of cryptic and surreal events that see her delving deeper into the mystery of the network in a narrative that explores themes of consciousness, perception, and the nature of reality.

 

 

The 'Wired' is a virtual reality-world that contains and supports the very sum of all human communication and networks, created with the telegraph, televisions, and telephone services, and expanded with the Internet, cyberspace, and subsequent networks. The series assumes that the Wired could be linked to a system that enables unconscious communication between people and machines without physical interface. The storyline introduces such a system with the Schumann resonance, a property of the Earth's magnetic field that theoretically allows for unhindered long distance communications. If such a link were created, the network would become equivalent to Reality as the general consensus of all perceptions and knowledge. The increasingly thin invisible line between what is real and what is virtual/digital begins to slowly shatter.