The Navi is on. Lain's fingers flit across keys, flick away adverts, and fiddle with the dials of the coolant system. A torrent seeds, downloads, and deletes within attoseconds. The Wired is spread in front of her like a city seen from both above and below. The pedestrians stroll with their Ethernet connections. Cyber cafes trundle along on bulky routers. A few more in the know glide gracefully in blacked-out limousines, appearing in duplicate as they proxy down alleyways and lift bytes from the open doors of corporate skyscrapers.
Within the Wired, Lain feels as if she is omniscient. She has the highest vantage point; she is the highest vantage point. Knights approach her with offerings and forwarded programming. She accepts the gifts with flair and sophistication. Their favors are rewarded with connections, rumors, money, things that Lain no longer needs.
On occasion, her skin will crawl and her hair will stand on end. The sensation of observation, the feeling that she is being watched—the queasy desire to turn her back on the Wired for just a moment and check behind her for whoever has discovered the higher ground. She cocoons herself in outdated machines and protective passwords in an attempt to stave off paranoia. The Knights are understanding when close, but titter when they believe they are out of her hearing.
With a flash of frustration, she presses escape and leans back in her chair.
If it has eyes, it has a body. If it has a body, it has an account.
She shuffles through fetal coding, looking for potential keyloggers and rootkits. The Navi browser is partitioned and she practices by breaking into her father's business account. Within a few clicks, she can oversee the last year's tax returns. Boring fare, but she files a copy away as a trophy.
The person she is searching for will have far better security than her father. She casts her net wider, searching for more practice. Taro's account is well protected but has some childish mistakes that allow her to slip herself in. He has a collection of uncool pop music that would undoubtedly damage his Cyberia cred. She giggles and exits the folder.
Her attention turns to her sister's account. Lain's head tilts as an error loudly dings out of her speakers.
Forgot your password? mocks a prompt.
She pauses her programming and tries a few times by hand.
This account has been suspended, the browser replies.
She takes note and closes the window. That will be a mystery for another time. Perhaps her sister got caught torrenting her favorite television shows, or was overtaken by phishers, or actually did forget her password too many times.
She delves further into the Wired, brushing against spheres of media influence and tangled social networks. A school of email addresses swim by. She spot's Arisu's, glimmering and pink, near the center of the crowd. If she wanted, she could reach out and grasp it.
Lain could read her every correspondence, trawl through her search history, stand witness to the streams of video and text passing through Arisu's mobile. Lain, the omnipotent, the voyeur, might as well be standing behind Arisu and peering over her shoulder at her desktop monitor.
One hand reaches forward while the other draws back.
She feels the sensation, again, of being watched.
Lain curls and coils inward. Her window fractures into a thousand tabs.
Mouths without a face. Ears without a face. Eyes without a face. The uncanny projections of pathetic hackers that couldn't manage to render themselves fully clamor for her attention. She shuts them out and ignores the rows of talking heads spamming her feed. She dives deeper, below the social strata, below grayed-out databases, below phone lines and battery feeds. Below silicon, below zeroes and ones, below the atomic dance of electrons rising and falling in shelled layers.
To her dismay, she still didn't feel alone.
"Everyone is connected," she hears herself say.
She gazes upwards, where the surface shines. She could spot her own dim reflection looking back, seen as if through a glass, darkly.
She lifts a hand and splashes it away. The face re-resolves into a man's, adorned with two red stripes and surrounded by wild hair.
She prods at the man's account and finds nothing. The password is seven zeroes. He has no body, no records, simply dead air.
"Are you God?" she asks.
The man smiles and parrots the question back to her. "Are you God?"
"Am I Lain?" she replies.
"Am I Lain?" he repeats.
A window pops up and she hovers her cursor over the prompt.
That username has already been taken, it says.
She shuts off the Navi but she can still see the Wired.
With a sigh, Lain leans back and shuts her eyes. It feels like the action takes too long, as if she were closing far more than just two. The backs of her eyelids pulse with red and purple static.
"Next time," she says quietly. "I'll do better, next time."