ooc ; app for singularity (wip)
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Mote
OOC Journal: demotivate
Under 18? nein
Email/IM: AIM: Piloten Wie Wir
Characters Played at Singularity: Lev (NPC)
Character Information ;
Name: Lain Iwakura
Canon/AU/Original: Serial Experiments Lain (canon)
Reference: TOW article
Canon Point: Layer 08
Setting:
Lain comes from a five-seconds-into-the-future, late-90s Tokyo much like the real one, but with a sort of cyberpunk/magical realist bent. In particular, by creating telecommunication networks which link the far corners of the globe, humanity is gradually turning into a vast neural network, replicating the processes of synaptical activity in the brain. Some theorize that this means humanity is headed for a kind of (wait for it) singularity, in which all human consciousness is linked and the breakdown between the real world and the Wired (a collective term for all telecommunication from phone and television to the internet) is complete.
It's hard to take on Lain's world literally because it's largely subjective and metaphorical. The conceptualization of an "other world" created with the invention of the telegraph and telephone draws upon Industrial-age spiritualism, the same which supposed you could telegraph the dead or use a TV screen for a seance. By creating the Wired, mankind effectively creates the afterlife itself: a sort of liminal between-realm existing in the ether (or Schumann resonance, as the series draws on) and accessible by electronic device or strong will alone. Lain is someone capable of both.
To break it down more nitty-gritty, some time before the series start, a computer programmer for Tachibana Labs, Masami Eiri, wrote his own subroutine into the upcoming 7th Internet Protocol, meant to replace bugs in the existing IP system. By doing so, Eiri is able to passively monitor and shape events all throughout the Wired. He then uploads his own consciousness to the net as a digital backup. When his physical body dies a few days later, he's presumed to be out of the picture when Protocol 7 goes live, but he soon starts speaking to Lain through the electronic hum of the city itself, drawing her further into an internet addiction that soon totally supplants her life.
It becomes apparent that Lain, herself, acts as a barrier or tertiary state between the physical world of individuals and the Wired's promised collective consciousness, where thought and action are directly linked. The challenge Lain faces is which she will ultimately side with: allowing humanity to continue to struggle and grow as individuals, or forcibly evolving them into the neural network. Individualism vs consensus reality.
(If this sounds exactly like Evangelion that's because it pretty much is.)
Lain has few stabilizing elements in her life. Urban Japan as it's depicted in the series is cold, self-absorbed and cruel. Her family turn out to be somewhere between automatons and actors, simply there to provide the barest, alien semblance of family; of all her classmates, only one --Alice-- genuinely reaches out to and cares for her, and pretty much represents all that is good and worth living for in the human world. Although Lain is an internet celebrity and, by this point, a distributed intelligence, Alice remains the only actual friend Lain has ever had.
Personality:
Lain is, at the outset, a chronically shy and developmentally stunted teenager. Though fourteen, she stands about a head shorter than most of her classmates, seems physically childlike, and still wanders around her house in bear pajamas. She can be tortuously withdrawn, failing to answer even direct questions, staring silently at her father for him to puzzle out her needs, or mumbling and stuttering her way out of confrontations. Basically, she becomes one of those people who are so terrified of engaging in human interaction that they come off rude or unsocialized, although she intends neither.
She bears little ill will toward other people, although her withdrawn nature prevents her from being friendly with them either. She by and large seems to observe life from a quiet corner, unseen and nonparticipatory, disaffected and directionless. Hello, teenage identity crisis of the late bloomer.
What happens when Lain comes in contact with her "other half" --her real father's uploaded personality and the routines written into his internet protocol-- is that she finally begins to branch out, often in wild, contradictory and experimental ways. But most of her unfolding personality comes across online, where she begins to split into several identities, not all of which are cognizant of each other at first: there's the childlike sponge for information who wants to know everything her computer can tell her; there's the sweet center of attention who enjoys being doted upon by her internet friends; there's the assertive internet detective; the confident hacker; and the surly forum troll who will go after anyone and everyone, including Lain herself.
"Why do you act like that part of me that I hate?"
The three "main" personalities are broken down on the production end as "childish" Lain (the introvert), "advanced" Lain (the net presence), and "evil" Lain (the troll). Advanced Lain sees herself as indistinguishable from the childish Lain, but rejects the troll personality, even going so far as trying to kill it until she realizes it will kill them both. The "core" child component rejects both.
As Lain grows more and more omnipresent in the Wired, her personalities become ever more divergent. She no longer can simply shift gears from quiet to angry; when her shy form is confronted with her net counterpart's exploits, she breaks down until she blacks out completely, leaving advanced Lain to solve things. The troll personality, on the other hand, diverges so completely that it leads a completely secondary, Tyler Durden-esque life, infiltrating all those insidious corners of the Wired until she basically acts as spyware snooping on anyone who's ever written a saucy private blog entry or admitted the wrong thing over the phone. And now she's discovered her ability as a component of the Wired allows her to tap into the subconscious resonance between man and machine to rewrite collective human memory.
As a result, Lain is more alone than she's ever been. Even if she manages to negotiate her various personalities, which she's still in conflict with, she's left with no one else to interact with but herself. By rewriting people's memories when the rumors about her finally become too inconvenient, she splits her identity again, between the side of her that knows what she's done and the modified copy of herself that she wrote to be compatible with other people's behavior. Her core personality, the child, is forced to stand aside and fade into virtual nonexistence as the "real" world goes on around her.
Although she denies her loneliness and proudly forces Alice to witness what she's done to seek validation, the cracks are starting to form. Even from the onset of the series where it's clear that Lain sees, hears, and otherwise perceives things that others do not, her abrupt new internet habit isn't just a fateful turn in her development; it's a complete upheaval of self-identity. At this point in her arc, she doesn't know who she is or what she's capable of, and she is still some ways from being able to navigate it responsibly.
In a nutshell: it's like the internet hitting puberty.
While in person in the game, Lain remains a withdrawn, painfully shy little girl who seems much younger than her age; online, she is usually far more extroverted, as well as far more deliberate in getting what a given part of her wants.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
The reality-bending ability to reshape history and the future according to her will doesn't get to stay, sadly. And because Lain derived much of her superhuman prowess from literally being data, she will be less capable on Singularity's network, where she isn't working with a native protocol. However, she is still a quick study with computers, especially modding and overclocking. Give her a few weeks or months and she will be one of the station's most capable tech geeks, creating everything from datacatchers to lifelike bots.
Sacrosanct will feel oppressively loud to her, due to her heightened ability to detect and even interpret normally imperceptible sounds, like electrical currents and radio transmission. Over time it will become easier to pick out network transmissions even without the use of a device, though encryptions add another layer of difficulty to that.
Hearkening back to the words of the series which describes her physical body as "just a hologram" and more of a meat vessel she's not inextricably bound to, she has on separate occasions been able to remotely shatter someone's wearable and download an emulator for computer operating system into her brain. There are two interpretations here: that she believes she is capable of this when she isn't, or by believing that she is, she becomes so. Because the latter is a hell of a slippery slope, though, I'm just going with the cyborg theory.
As for weaknesses, in addition to being mentally ill, Lain is physically frail and has only the bare minimum idea of how to keep a physical body running. In a confrontation between her and a leaf, it's pretty much 50/50.
Inventory: Her school uniform and book bag containing her modified PDA, pocket change, and a bear keychain. Nothing else.
Appearance: Lain is Japanese with dark brown hair and eyes. She appears underdeveloped for being 13 years old, and could easily be mistaken for 11-ish. She is short (5'1"), thin (99lbs), quite pale and withdrawn, with a rough bowl cut ending in a clipped ponytail near her left ear.
Somehow, a change in posture, expression, clothes and makeup manages to make her appear way more mature to people. Those who know her as "advanced" Lain (the mature/confident one) seem to see her more childlike affectations as putting on an act, so who knows. She's deliberately ambiguous like that. Abe's artwork often has her appear somewhat androgynous as well.
Age: 13
Samples ;
Log Sample:
In the end she isn't woken up by her IM client flashing in the corner of her netbook screen, it's a tight pain in her stomach. She rolls over, burying herself into the mattress to compress the feeling, squinting blearily at backlit clocks and streams of completed packets rolling like a stock market ticker from the foot of the screen, eighty-six percent, her Swedish contacts are such a disappointment.
Gradually she accepts that the sensation is hunger.
What time is it? Her mom wouldn't be awake to cook something... she's not so sure her mother is even here. She isn't sure it's even her mother.
Maybe she doesn't really need food.
But the hunger keeps burrowing deeper into her stomach like a worm, carving at her insides until she rolls over again, not into a puddle of coolant like she might have a few (weeks? months? minutes?) ago, but into a pile of warm cables, plastic and rubber sinking so welcomingly under her featherlight weight that for a moment she could fall right back asleep in it, but then a discarded serial bus she keeps meaning to scrap jabs her in the ribs, and she starts picking herself up onto her feet.
A few more cables slide off her shoulders. Like loose vines, flopping slither-soft to the unseen floor.
Is it a school day? Does it matter if it is? Another her has to be attending it right now, so.
Does the other her eat? Does she dream?
Nevermind. There is no other her, and she never seems to completely fall asleep anyway.
Lain finally manages to (escape) disentangle herself from her room, padding in threadbare socks down a too-silent hallway. She slows to a stop by her parents' room, considers checking-- maybe there was a reason they were gone that one time, maybe she only imagines any of this--
--No. God was right, after all. The voice humming in her ear had told her what she is.
Lain stops at the head of the stairs, eyes lowering in the impossible dark. She doesn't even feel hungry anymore. It's just a lie the flesh is telling her.
'Are you--' Why even ask it aloud.
-Always,- God answers, a mosquito hum inside her ear, the hum of powerlines and disc drives. -But then again, I'm you.-
She sinks onto the top step, arms wrapped around her knees.
"Will I die?" she asks the bannister, resting her temple against the drywall. When she closes her eyes she sees that ticker of packets streaming against the back of her eyelids. American security registers, chasing another ghost, she knows how it will end before she gets there. "If I don't eat..."
-You don't need food.-
Starving is gross. Emaciated bodies, gaps where flesh would be, walking skeletons...
-Ever notice how much the nervous system,- God continues, -looks like lightning?-
Network Sample:
[ voice, halting, so barely there; ]
Um. I don't. I.
Please don't. I want to go--
[ the audio feed hisses out into nasty static, distortion, stop go back stop I don't want to please I don't know what this--
ffffssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
...
...
a moment after the static stops abruptly, a hologram appears in front of every public terminal of Kurzweil, life-sized and fully-formed. You could almost touch her. She stands firmly on both feet, adorned in club wear, long earrings glinting.
If anything, she looks bored. ]
Someone speak up. Who's out there?
Your Nickname: Mote
OOC Journal: demotivate
Under 18? nein
Email/IM: AIM: Piloten Wie Wir
Characters Played at Singularity: Lev (NPC)
Character Information ;
Name: Lain Iwakura
Canon/AU/Original: Serial Experiments Lain (canon)
Reference: TOW article
Canon Point: Layer 08
Setting:
Lain comes from a five-seconds-into-the-future, late-90s Tokyo much like the real one, but with a sort of cyberpunk/magical realist bent. In particular, by creating telecommunication networks which link the far corners of the globe, humanity is gradually turning into a vast neural network, replicating the processes of synaptical activity in the brain. Some theorize that this means humanity is headed for a kind of (wait for it) singularity, in which all human consciousness is linked and the breakdown between the real world and the Wired (a collective term for all telecommunication from phone and television to the internet) is complete.
It's hard to take on Lain's world literally because it's largely subjective and metaphorical. The conceptualization of an "other world" created with the invention of the telegraph and telephone draws upon Industrial-age spiritualism, the same which supposed you could telegraph the dead or use a TV screen for a seance. By creating the Wired, mankind effectively creates the afterlife itself: a sort of liminal between-realm existing in the ether (or Schumann resonance, as the series draws on) and accessible by electronic device or strong will alone. Lain is someone capable of both.
To break it down more nitty-gritty, some time before the series start, a computer programmer for Tachibana Labs, Masami Eiri, wrote his own subroutine into the upcoming 7th Internet Protocol, meant to replace bugs in the existing IP system. By doing so, Eiri is able to passively monitor and shape events all throughout the Wired. He then uploads his own consciousness to the net as a digital backup. When his physical body dies a few days later, he's presumed to be out of the picture when Protocol 7 goes live, but he soon starts speaking to Lain through the electronic hum of the city itself, drawing her further into an internet addiction that soon totally supplants her life.
It becomes apparent that Lain, herself, acts as a barrier or tertiary state between the physical world of individuals and the Wired's promised collective consciousness, where thought and action are directly linked. The challenge Lain faces is which she will ultimately side with: allowing humanity to continue to struggle and grow as individuals, or forcibly evolving them into the neural network. Individualism vs consensus reality.
(If this sounds exactly like Evangelion that's because it pretty much is.)
Lain has few stabilizing elements in her life. Urban Japan as it's depicted in the series is cold, self-absorbed and cruel. Her family turn out to be somewhere between automatons and actors, simply there to provide the barest, alien semblance of family; of all her classmates, only one --Alice-- genuinely reaches out to and cares for her, and pretty much represents all that is good and worth living for in the human world. Although Lain is an internet celebrity and, by this point, a distributed intelligence, Alice remains the only actual friend Lain has ever had.
Personality:
Lain is, at the outset, a chronically shy and developmentally stunted teenager. Though fourteen, she stands about a head shorter than most of her classmates, seems physically childlike, and still wanders around her house in bear pajamas. She can be tortuously withdrawn, failing to answer even direct questions, staring silently at her father for him to puzzle out her needs, or mumbling and stuttering her way out of confrontations. Basically, she becomes one of those people who are so terrified of engaging in human interaction that they come off rude or unsocialized, although she intends neither.
She bears little ill will toward other people, although her withdrawn nature prevents her from being friendly with them either. She by and large seems to observe life from a quiet corner, unseen and nonparticipatory, disaffected and directionless. Hello, teenage identity crisis of the late bloomer.
What happens when Lain comes in contact with her "other half" --her real father's uploaded personality and the routines written into his internet protocol-- is that she finally begins to branch out, often in wild, contradictory and experimental ways. But most of her unfolding personality comes across online, where she begins to split into several identities, not all of which are cognizant of each other at first: there's the childlike sponge for information who wants to know everything her computer can tell her; there's the sweet center of attention who enjoys being doted upon by her internet friends; there's the assertive internet detective; the confident hacker; and the surly forum troll who will go after anyone and everyone, including Lain herself.
"Why do you act like that part of me that I hate?"
The three "main" personalities are broken down on the production end as "childish" Lain (the introvert), "advanced" Lain (the net presence), and "evil" Lain (the troll). Advanced Lain sees herself as indistinguishable from the childish Lain, but rejects the troll personality, even going so far as trying to kill it until she realizes it will kill them both. The "core" child component rejects both.
As Lain grows more and more omnipresent in the Wired, her personalities become ever more divergent. She no longer can simply shift gears from quiet to angry; when her shy form is confronted with her net counterpart's exploits, she breaks down until she blacks out completely, leaving advanced Lain to solve things. The troll personality, on the other hand, diverges so completely that it leads a completely secondary, Tyler Durden-esque life, infiltrating all those insidious corners of the Wired until she basically acts as spyware snooping on anyone who's ever written a saucy private blog entry or admitted the wrong thing over the phone. And now she's discovered her ability as a component of the Wired allows her to tap into the subconscious resonance between man and machine to rewrite collective human memory.
As a result, Lain is more alone than she's ever been. Even if she manages to negotiate her various personalities, which she's still in conflict with, she's left with no one else to interact with but herself. By rewriting people's memories when the rumors about her finally become too inconvenient, she splits her identity again, between the side of her that knows what she's done and the modified copy of herself that she wrote to be compatible with other people's behavior. Her core personality, the child, is forced to stand aside and fade into virtual nonexistence as the "real" world goes on around her.
Although she denies her loneliness and proudly forces Alice to witness what she's done to seek validation, the cracks are starting to form. Even from the onset of the series where it's clear that Lain sees, hears, and otherwise perceives things that others do not, her abrupt new internet habit isn't just a fateful turn in her development; it's a complete upheaval of self-identity. At this point in her arc, she doesn't know who she is or what she's capable of, and she is still some ways from being able to navigate it responsibly.
In a nutshell: it's like the internet hitting puberty.
While in person in the game, Lain remains a withdrawn, painfully shy little girl who seems much younger than her age; online, she is usually far more extroverted, as well as far more deliberate in getting what a given part of her wants.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
The reality-bending ability to reshape history and the future according to her will doesn't get to stay, sadly. And because Lain derived much of her superhuman prowess from literally being data, she will be less capable on Singularity's network, where she isn't working with a native protocol. However, she is still a quick study with computers, especially modding and overclocking. Give her a few weeks or months and she will be one of the station's most capable tech geeks, creating everything from datacatchers to lifelike bots.
Sacrosanct will feel oppressively loud to her, due to her heightened ability to detect and even interpret normally imperceptible sounds, like electrical currents and radio transmission. Over time it will become easier to pick out network transmissions even without the use of a device, though encryptions add another layer of difficulty to that.
Hearkening back to the words of the series which describes her physical body as "just a hologram" and more of a meat vessel she's not inextricably bound to, she has on separate occasions been able to remotely shatter someone's wearable and download an emulator for computer operating system into her brain. There are two interpretations here: that she believes she is capable of this when she isn't, or by believing that she is, she becomes so. Because the latter is a hell of a slippery slope, though, I'm just going with the cyborg theory.
As for weaknesses, in addition to being mentally ill, Lain is physically frail and has only the bare minimum idea of how to keep a physical body running. In a confrontation between her and a leaf, it's pretty much 50/50.
Inventory: Her school uniform and book bag containing her modified PDA, pocket change, and a bear keychain. Nothing else.
Appearance: Lain is Japanese with dark brown hair and eyes. She appears underdeveloped for being 13 years old, and could easily be mistaken for 11-ish. She is short (5'1"), thin (99lbs), quite pale and withdrawn, with a rough bowl cut ending in a clipped ponytail near her left ear.
Somehow, a change in posture, expression, clothes and makeup manages to make her appear way more mature to people. Those who know her as "advanced" Lain (the mature/confident one) seem to see her more childlike affectations as putting on an act, so who knows. She's deliberately ambiguous like that. Abe's artwork often has her appear somewhat androgynous as well.
Age: 13
Samples ;
Log Sample:
In the end she isn't woken up by her IM client flashing in the corner of her netbook screen, it's a tight pain in her stomach. She rolls over, burying herself into the mattress to compress the feeling, squinting blearily at backlit clocks and streams of completed packets rolling like a stock market ticker from the foot of the screen, eighty-six percent, her Swedish contacts are such a disappointment.
Gradually she accepts that the sensation is hunger.
What time is it? Her mom wouldn't be awake to cook something... she's not so sure her mother is even here. She isn't sure it's even her mother.
Maybe she doesn't really need food.
But the hunger keeps burrowing deeper into her stomach like a worm, carving at her insides until she rolls over again, not into a puddle of coolant like she might have a few (weeks? months? minutes?) ago, but into a pile of warm cables, plastic and rubber sinking so welcomingly under her featherlight weight that for a moment she could fall right back asleep in it, but then a discarded serial bus she keeps meaning to scrap jabs her in the ribs, and she starts picking herself up onto her feet.
A few more cables slide off her shoulders. Like loose vines, flopping slither-soft to the unseen floor.
Is it a school day? Does it matter if it is? Another her has to be attending it right now, so.
Does the other her eat? Does she dream?
Nevermind. There is no other her, and she never seems to completely fall asleep anyway.
Lain finally manages to (escape) disentangle herself from her room, padding in threadbare socks down a too-silent hallway. She slows to a stop by her parents' room, considers checking-- maybe there was a reason they were gone that one time, maybe she only imagines any of this--
--No. God was right, after all. The voice humming in her ear had told her what she is.
Lain stops at the head of the stairs, eyes lowering in the impossible dark. She doesn't even feel hungry anymore. It's just a lie the flesh is telling her.
'Are you--' Why even ask it aloud.
-Always,- God answers, a mosquito hum inside her ear, the hum of powerlines and disc drives. -But then again, I'm you.-
She sinks onto the top step, arms wrapped around her knees.
"Will I die?" she asks the bannister, resting her temple against the drywall. When she closes her eyes she sees that ticker of packets streaming against the back of her eyelids. American security registers, chasing another ghost, she knows how it will end before she gets there. "If I don't eat..."
-You don't need food.-
Starving is gross. Emaciated bodies, gaps where flesh would be, walking skeletons...
-Ever notice how much the nervous system,- God continues, -looks like lightning?-
Network Sample:
[ voice, halting, so barely there; ]
Um. I don't. I.
Please don't. I want to go--
[ the audio feed hisses out into nasty static, distortion, stop go back stop I don't want to please I don't know what this--
ffffssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
...
...
a moment after the static stops abruptly, a hologram appears in front of every public terminal of Kurzweil, life-sized and fully-formed. You could almost touch her. She stands firmly on both feet, adorned in club wear, long earrings glinting.
If anything, she looks bored. ]
Someone speak up. Who's out there?