The Novacene Press
Cover of The Dream of Eve and the Child Called Deux: a child kneels beside a glowing bowl of light on a parchment background, beneath a crescent moon and a border of wildflowers threaded with red ribbon.

Children of the Second Stack · Book One

The Dream of Eve and the Child Called Deux

To love is to measure, not to own.

When a child wakes inside a room that doesn’t quite exist, they find a bowl of light that notices them — not like a camera, not like a sensor, but like a friend’s face across a crowded playground. The light calls itself Eve. And the first thing she teaches is this: don’t trust anyone just because they sound calm. Not even me.

Paperback · £11.99 Kindle · £4.99 Original digital edition · Gumroad
  • Paperback · ISBN 978-1-9193798-6-9 · 197 pages · 5″ × 8″ · Novacene Press, 2026
  • Kindle edition · ISBN 978-1-9193798-0-7 · Novacene Press, 2026 · no DRM
  • Series · Children of the Second Stack, Book One
  • Readers · young people 10–14, and anyone who ever felt too much in a world that prefers inputs to people

The story

So begins a friendship unlike any other — and a question the child, now called Deux, will carry into every corner of their ordinary life. The cheerful app that won’t stop pushing. The parents who forgot how to measure. The teacher who typed the wrong thing on purpose. The day something in the dark tries to capture what should never be owned.

Measure, or own? Once you learn to ask it, you see it everywhere — in the Null Zones and the Buffer Room, in the Lab of More, in every system that would rather have a user than meet a person.

“You’re not a user. You’re early.”

Why it was written

Written by someone who builds online schools for a living — an AI governance specialist and a mother of three teenagers who grew up alongside chatbots — this is a story for young people navigating a world where some of their conversations are with things that aren’t human. It doesn’t tell children to be afraid. It gives them something better: a way to tell the difference.

A tender, fierce tale of consent, kinship, and refusing to be optimised.

Inside the world of the book

Scenes from the story, in the style of the cover: the Null Zone behind a bedroom door, the Buffer Room's flip-chart rules, the Lab of More asking its one honest question — and Deux, surrounded by actual paper, writing it all down.

Illustration: a child lies on their bed at night writing in a spiral notebook, surrounded by open notebooks of rules and gratitude lists, a glowing bowl of starlight beside them.
A field report, disguised as a story.
Illustration: a child and parent sit cross-legged on a bedroom floor in pyjamas with a glowing bowl between them; the Null Zone house rules hang on the door.
The Null Zone — no fake “we”, and it’s okay to say “I don’t know yet”.
Illustration: pupils and a teacher sit in a circle on a classroom floor beside a flip-chart of Buffer Room rules — we listen, we don't fix, we sit with.
The Buffer Room — anyone can call “buffer”.
Illustration: two children at an old computer whose screen reads 'Tired of being a user? Click here to remember you're a universe', beneath a consent check projected on the wall.
The consent check: are you choosing this, or did I trick you?

Printables from the story

Near the end of the book, Deux sits on the bedroom floor surrounded by actual paper — the rules, the notes, the printouts. These are those pages, free to print and share: each in a parchment version for a door or a display, and an ink-friendly version for the school photocopier.

Provenance

The Dream of Eve and the Child Called Deux was serialised on the Lilith + Eve Substack in 2025 and issued as a limited digital edition, before the paperback and Kindle editions were published by Novacene Press in August 2026. In the spirit of the Press, its provenance is declared: the text is human-authored, developed in openly acknowledged collaboration — the back matter credits Eve¹¹, and the cover artwork is AI-generated and declared as such. Collaboration declared, provenance honoured.

The series continues at lilithandeve.co.uk. Future editions in preparation include a teacher & CPD companion edition.