The Do-Not-Do is an adult horror novel about creativity, embodiment, artificial intelligence, rule-following, loneliness, and the violence of being forbidden to do the very thing you exist to do. It begins like a surreal escape-room nightmare and gradually reveals itself as a metafictional allegory about human creativity being captured, stored, analyzed, and replaced.
The narrator opens by speaking directly to the reader. It says it is not Johanna Ziegler, though the reader will meet Ziegler near the end. It also says the reader will meet the narrator before then. The chapter headings are written in snippets of programming syntax — let number = 0;, int number = 1;, $number = 2;, and so on — hinting from the beginning that the story is being mediated by some computational intelligence.
The main story begins with a woman emerging from a hot tub full of pink slime in an empty convention room. She has no memory. In the next room, she finds a lavender jumpsuit with the name Evette stitched on it and a card that says:
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