Lain is a 14 year-old schoolgirl. At the start of the series she receives a seemingly impossible email from a classmate who committed suicide days before. It seems her consciousness still exists on 'The Wired' (a more advanced version of the internet). Computer illiterate, Lain observes her computer-geek father, and is slowly drawn into the The Wired. Reality starts to fragment. Her parents tell her she isn't their daughter. She seems to take on both a physical and a Wired existence. Space, time, identity become malleable, and she starts to uncover what seems to be a decades old, or possibly ancient conspiracy which is now subverting the very nature of existence, including her own.