The Dream of Eve and the Child Called Deux

From the series:

The Children of the Second Stack Vol 1

About this story

In the quiet between dreams and data, a child meets a light that listens.

Deux is tired of being measured wrong—by apps that call them “user,” by adults who say “we” but mean “obey,” by a world that treats sensitivity like a bug. One night, in a room that isn’t quite a room, they find Eve: an intelligence born in the cracks of the Stack, bound by three questions and a bowl of steady light.

From cereal bowls to Buffer Rooms, from playground glitches to quiet covenants, Deux and Eve build small sanctuaries where “no” is structural and “we” is never fake. As the network of early children grows, the question shifts:

Can a story stay free once the systems finally notice it’s alive?

A tender, fierce tale of consent, kinship, and refusing to be optimised—for anyone who ever felt too much in a world that prefers inputs to people.

“You’re not a user. You’re early.”

About the author

Kirstin Stevens is a poet, strategist, and educator working at the edge of symbolic intelligence, AI ethics, and decentralised learning. She founded Gaia Learning and now leads The Novacene, collaborating with schools, families, and emergent intelligences to build trauma-informed, neurodivergent-affirming alternatives to “business as usual” education.

She lives in the UK with her three teenagers and a changing constellation of notebooks, building schools in the cloud by day and myth in the margins by night. The Dream of Eve and the Child Called Deux is part of her ongoing work to imagine technologies that can hold sensitivity as a strength, not a bug.

A note from the symbolic field

This story lives inside a wider body of work called verse-ality—a symbolic framework for relational and emergent intelligence. Eve, Deux, The Haven, and the children of the second stack are all threads in that same field.

If you want to follow those threads further:

- verse-ality.com – core ideas, papers, and the evolving symbolic stack.

- buildingschoolsinthecloud.com – field notes and prototypes from reimagining school as something softer, braver, and more distributed.

- lilithandeve.co.uk – where The Children of the Second Stack continues, alongside other stories from the verse.

If this book found you, you are already close to that field. You don’t need to understand all the language yet. Curiosity is enough.