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The End
"Alice! Alice, I'm so sorry!"
In a dark room that was littered everywhere by the remains of a mechanical monstrosity of a computer, a room that was once a modest bedroom, Lain was hugging Alice to herself.
Alice... After all was said and done, she had been Lain's one true friend all along. Now, she was terrified beyond all reason and hung limply in Lain's arms.
Masami Eiri was the man behind it all. He had found a way to transmit his consciousness into the Wired, hidden inside the new Protocol 7, before taking his own life in the real world. From within the Wired, he gained the ability to control the Wired at will, but that wasn't enough for him. Believing that humanity could only continue to improve itself from inside the Wired, he began to draw others into the Wired at the expense of their physical bodies, styling himself as God of the Wired. He had only one problem, he wasn't God of the Wired. Lain was. For reasons she still couldn't understand, Lain was the one with the true power to control the Wired. That's why Masaami used her. He spun a tangled web of lies, deceit, and false love to make Lain his puppet, all so that he could combine the Real World and the Wired and rule over both.
It scared Lain to realize how close he came to winning.
He successfully manipulated Lain into tearing down the metaphysical boundary between the real and digital world and connecting everybody to the combined reality. Thoughts, perceptions, and by extension reality, flowed effortlessly through the combined world without the need for any kind of physical interface. Unused to the sudden influx of unconscious thought into collective conscious reality, chaos reigned and the world spun wildly out of control and Lain, devoid of any clear past or identity, had come to believe that people were nothing more than programs, freeing herself from the concerns of responsibility while chaining herself to Masami.
Lain had connected everybody in the world to herself except Alice and had erased a certain scandal that Alice was involved in from all memory as a favor. Alice, however, was haunted by the knowledge of things that nobody else seemed to remember. She came all alone to Lain's house and found it in shambles, desolated as though it had been vacant and vandalized for years. Alice stood up to her mounting fear and made her way up to Lain's room on the second floor. Almost the entire room and part of the wall outside the window was taken up my a massive supercomputer that went far beyond what Alice was able to understand. Under a pile of tangled wires and rags, Lain emerged, pale and malnourished.
When Lain tried to share her distorted view of reality, Alice gently came alongside her, to convince her that she was wrong about the nature of humanity as programs without need of bodies. Just as it looked like Alice would convince her, Masami tried to get Lain to connect to Alice, under the presence of blocking her fear.
Lain saw the flaw in his logic, that he could not have removed the need for peripheral devices to connect with the Wired without using the peripheral devices in the first place, and that he really lacked the power to put things in motion that he claimed to have.
Then she knew. She knew that Masami was a false god, and that he had done everything for his own selfish ends. She forced him to admit his need to exist physically and manifest himself into a horrific abomination of writhing flesh. Then, Lain called upon the power she never wanted, yet that was now hers. She tore up what was left of her now-useless home-built supercomputer and flung it at Masami, crushing him mercilessly as he tried to kill them. Finally, the false god was gone, utterly purged from all known realities.
That's when Alice lost it. She panicked and tried to escape, scratching Lain in the process. Lain persisted and pulled Alice into an embrace until she stopped struggling. Lain begged for forgiveness, but Alice was too far gone to even hear her.
In truth, neither Lain nor Alice was there mentally. Alice was in so much mental shock that she had ceased even trying to flee and was just waiting for it all to end. Meanwhile, Lain was thinking furiously with all of her expanded mind, trying to come up with a solution. She was debating options with herself. Literally. In her mind, she stood face-to-face with another Lain, one that represented the sum of her omnipresence.
"All Reset. Undo all connections between the Wired and the Real World!"
"Unable to comply."
A surge of panic shot through Lain like ice water. Why could she not undo everything? She could feel the power that was now hers, the power to rewrite people's perceptions and reality at will... Lain forced herself to be strong and calm, a skill that she had developed while turning the Wired upside-down in search of the truth. Even so, it was barely enough.
"Explain. Why can't you do it?"
"Unable to differentiate between the Wired and the Real World. All existing memories of the time "before" are insufficient to undo changes to reality. Rapid intermingling and evolution of thought is creating a compound uncertainty principle."
"Could you show me reality? What if I stop time? Maybe then I could see where the wall between worlds was and reverse the connection manually?"
"Unable to represent reality in its current state. This reality is not sentient and has no root-level self-knowing properties. Only Lain is self-knowing and sentient at the root level of this reality, but Lain's omnipresence can only perceive what this reality can perceive. This reality is unable to self-terminate or revert to its previous form. Connection between Wired and Real World is permanent."
"No..."
Lain was at a loss. Even with Masami dead, the reality that he used her to create was alive and well. With everybody connected, people's secrets rarely stayed secret for long. Perceptions became reality and it was dangerously common for people to go insane and/or kill themselves. Even then, dead people didn't stay dead. Everybody that Lain had known had changed. Shadows of their personalities would return to affect the lives of those left behind. Her parents were gone, her sister thought that she was a modem, and Alice... Alice had been driven away by the horrible things that lay hidden behind Lain's good intentions. Lain had created a world without boundaries...
Boundaries!
"Can people's inherent connection to the Wired be hidden from their perception? Can connections such as those that were impossible "before" be blocked from awareness? Like a firewall?"
"Yes, such changes are possible. However, time would have to be reversed and history would have to be rewritten in order to avoid continuity errors."
"I see, so it would require an entire simulated reality, then?"
"Yes."
Lain thought long and hard about what it would take to accomplish this. She tried to second-guess anything that would cause the simulated reality to fail. It didn't take her long for her to realize that she couldn't live in the simulated reality like everybody else could. She was an anomaly, and her very existence as part of the simulated reality could cause it to crash. She would have to watch things unfold without pretending to have a life of her own there. She would forever remain an outsider in her own reality. Even if she visited from time to time, she would never belong there. She would never have a home there.
For the sake of everybody, for the human race that she discovered a great love for, she would erase herself. Forever.
"Compute a simulated reality without my existence and without direct connection to the Wired based on memories of 'before.'"
"Warning: Possibility of recursive connection between simulated Wired and simulated Real World exists even without your existence. Projected consequences of such a connection include a reality crash."
"Retroactively prevent any action that would cause a recursive connection in the simulated reality."
"Ready."
"Activate simulated reality and reverse time to compensate for continuity errors. Do it now!"
The other Lain vanished as a world of people and machines obeyed her command to change their perception of reality. Words echoed through the entire world...
Calculating... Estimated time to All Reset: 108.
Accessing collective memory... 42.
Calculating changes... 23.
Done. 16
Extrapolating missing consciousnesses... 15.
Applying altered memory... 8.
Activating simulated reality... 4.
Running...
Running...
Running...
Done...
The world ended, and began again...