After a classmate's suicide, fourteen-year-old Lain Iwakura receives an email from the dead girl claiming she has merely abandoned her body to live inside the Wired, a global communications network resembling a more immersive internet. Lain, until now barely computer-literate, becomes obsessed with the Wired and upgrades her hardware into a room-filling rig. The deeper she goes, the more she finds of herself already active online, and the boundary between the Wired and the physical world starts to dissolve.