Don't Read The Comments

by copperbadge

Summary:

Lauren woke up one morning with the ability to delete any comment, from anyone, anywhere on the internet.

Chapter 1: Author's Notes

Welcome to Don't Read The Comments, an original work by Copperbadge! I am posting this novel here for the purpose of sharing with my readership and asking for their help in editing it before it goes to press. This is your chance to offer constructive criticism, ask questions, and suggest changes to make this book better and more reader-friendly.

So as not to clutter up AO3's tags, I have tagged the story very minimally, but I will put warnings in the notes on each chapter for content. Broadly speaking I can warn for violence including discussion of and threats of mass shooting, various *ist language particularly including misogyny and homophobia, and characters who take quite a casual approach to bigotry and fascism, including active white supremacists.

If you have questions about these warnings or about specific chapter warnings please don't hesitate to contact me at AO3 or via email (copperbadge at gmail) to ask about them.

SUMMARY:

Lauren woke up one morning with the ability to delete any comment, from anyone, anywhere on the internet. An amazing power, of course, but one that Lauren knew had to be used carefully. She consulted friends, scholars, and the data wonks at her work to try and create an ethical code for her Deletion, but her studies took her to some dark places...and she may have accidentally, temporarily, committed a murder.

That escalated quickly.

Fortunately, her mistakes can be fixed by the UnDeleter, a woman named Eppie. Less fortunately, Eppie the Undeleter is the most beautiful woman Lauren's ever met, and she thinks Lauren is a walking dumpster fire. So goes true love.

But both Lauren and Eppie have a bigger problem: there's another Deleter out there, and they aren't nearly as worried about ethics, or making the world a better place. In fact, they'd like to Delete Lauren, if they could. Which means Lauren will need all the help she can get in taking them out first, including the assistance of her sidekick, a frying-pan wielding teenager named Tanya. But Lauren's code of ethics, while blurry, is pretty clear on one thing: no more deleting people.

Which is going to make neutralizing another Deleter sort of difficult....