via Can someone explain the ending of Serial Experiments Lain to me?*spoilers*.

The entire world of “Serial Experiments Lain” is a computer simulation. Everybody in the series is a more or less sophisticated AI. Thus can hacking computers directly affect the world, thus can kids playing computer games accidentally kill people in the “real world”. It’s all computer data. All you need is the “protocol 7″ that translates your computer data to reality, which is possible because you’re already inside a computer.

The whole world of Lain oozes electronic weirdness anyway. There are the steadily humming telephone wires, the unreal, moving shadows, the organic-looking high-tech – quite a lot of clues hinting at an artificial world. It’s almost a surprise that of all the people, only Iwakura Lain eventually understands what it all means.

And what does it mean? The entire message of Lain is that, as soon as you understand, truly understand that you’re nothing but data inside a computer simulation, you are able to transcend your own existence and become much more than a mere part of the simulation you used to live in. You actually gain the ability to directly rewrite the simulation – you cannot leave the computer you live in, obviously, but you are no longer restricted to what your original programming made of you. You become a god of the computer world you live in.

via Serial Experiments Lain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Serial Experiments Lain describes “the Wired” as the sum of human communication networks, created with the telegraph and telephone services, and expanded with the Internet and subsequent networks.

The anime 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 was created, the network would become equivalent to Reality as the generalconsensus of all perceptions and knowledge. The thin line between what is real and what is possible would then begin to blur.