Short answers, pulled from the story.
Serial Experiments Lain follows a fourteen-year-old girl named Lain Iwakura who discovers she is an autonomous computer program designed to merge the virtual Wired with the real world. The story centers on her struggle to accept her identity as a de facto goddess for the Wired after resetting reality and erasing all memory of herself.
The true creator of Lain remains ambiguous, though Masami Eiri claims he embedded his consciousness into Protocol Seven to become its deity while Tachibana General Laboratories may have been involved in her design. Lain was ultimately revealed to be the evolved entity waiting for the Wired to reach its current state rather than simply a product of human engineering.
Serial Experiments Lain was released as a television anime series in 1998 by producer Yasuyuki Ueda. The video game scenario was written first and produced simultaneously with the anime series, which aired despite the multimedia strategy intended to connect across forms of media including manga and games.
The physical events occur primarily in Setagaya City, Tokyo, where Lain Iwakura lives in a quiet suburban home before receiving emails from beyond the grave. The narrative expands into the Wired, a vast virtual realm similar to the Internet that serves as the digital plane where characters like Chisa Yomoda claim to exist after abandoning their physical forms.
Loneliness represents a lack of communication throughout the story, highlighted by the insert song named Kodoku no shigunaru or signal of loneliness. Writer Chiaki Konaka designed the series to communicate human feelings while showing viewers between 14 and 15 years old the multidimensional wavelength of the existential self through mental illness themes like dissociative identity disorder.