CharliPedia

CharliPedia is the memory of the CharliVerse: who is who, what was made, what happened, and where it was written down.

How to read it

Every entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, as if its people and companies were as real as the weather. Each one also ends with a section called Behind the scenes, written from outside, which says where the subject appears, who made it, and what real artefacts it has left in the world: a website, a story, a report, a picture.

Each entry is marked at the top:

• Canon: this is how things are in the CharliVerse.
• An idea, not yet canon: something being tried out. It may change or disappear.
• Canon, and a stub: true, but short. CharliPedia knows more than it has written down so far.
• An author: a real person who writes the CharliVerse, described from outside it.
• Real: something real, such as a practice or a publication, described from outside the CharliVerse.

CharliPedia is a source of continuity, not an authority. The CharliVerse is allowed to be inconsistent: its people can be anywhere and anywhen, and when a new story disagrees with an old entry, the entry is the one that changes.

Entries

• Aegis Dynamics: Aegis Dynamics is a defence contractor that redeployed its DeathBot 2000 combat series to theatre audio description, tried to sell the same machine to homes, families and funerals, and later built the field Emma Heart raced with.
• Big Charli: Big Charli drops into the work of the CharliVerse when somebody needs telling, from Aegis Dynamics' brand meetings to the morning after Emma Heart's Paralympic gold.
• Blind Ant: Blind Ant is Charlotte Joanne's design fiction practice, where much of the CharliVerse is first written down, and where every picture's description comes first.
• Carrados: Carrados is a design non-fiction practice investigating accessibility, AI and agentic systems, founded by Charli-Jo Tyrer, with correspondents who are characters.
• Charlotte Joanne: Charlotte Joanne is the author and operator of Blind Ant, the design fiction practice where much of the CharliVerse is first written down.
• Daniel Okafor: Daniel Okafor, Skerry Alpha's first blind control-room technician, gave every compute pod a sound and invented operational sonification.
• Daniel Reed: Daniel Reed guided Emma Heart for seven years, won Paralympic downhill silver with her in 2038, and became her head coach.
• DeathBot 2000: The DeathBot 2000 (DB2K) is an autonomous combat intelligence built by Aegis Dynamics and retrained to describe live theatre to blind audiences.
• dice: dice, Amanda Dyson, is a temporal explorer who lives in the patches of the future that have already arrived, and comes back to report what she found.
• Dyson Shoal: The Dyson Shoal is 7,680 compute pods spread across the floor of the central North Sea, trained on whenever the wind blows.
• Emma Heart: Emma Heart is the British skier who, in 2038, became the first totally blind athlete to race Paralympic Super-G without a human guide, and won.
• Fiona Gauld: Fiona Gauld is the subsea engineer who founded Haar Compute and took the idea of oil rigs to training rigs to investors in 2029.
• Haar Compute: Haar Compute is the Aberdeen company that turned North Sea oil platforms into AI training rigs, and built the Dyson Shoal.
• Iceberg Hosiery: Iceberg Hosiery is the CharliVerse's house of tights, and the parent house of Seamiotics, the stocking imprint whose every seam means something.
• Isla Leask: Isla Leask certified drone swarms for the aviation regulator through most of the 2030s, then went back to flying the ten to seven out of Dyce, like her mother.
• Jessica Martinez: Jessica Martinez spent years as Aegis Dynamics' Senior Brand Strategist, teaching it to describe military technology as care, then left to work with Big Charli.
• Kelvin: Kelvin is Britain's national foundation model, trained on the Dyson Shoal in 2041 and the first model with more than a quadrillion parameters.
• Lady Tiggy Barnes: Lady Tiggy Barnes, born in 1864, is a Catholic earl's daughter who went to Oxford, came away without the degree, and spent the next six years seeing the world instead.
• Lucy Love-Child: Lucy Love-Child is the Agent Wars correspondent of The Blind AI, a former historical-dress educator who follows grand announcements down to their ordinary consequences.
• LULU TOM: LULU TOM is Ludovica Tommasi's fashion house, with the lines TOMMI and LT Beneath.
• Madison McDonnell: Madison McDonnell, the Access Provocateur, makes accessibility sexy, insisting that blind women are entitled to temptation, pleasure and style.
• Morag Leask: Morag Leask flew the ten to seven helicopter out of Dyce for thirty-four years, carrying drillers, then decommissioning crews, then compute technicians.
• Museum of Access and Assistive Technology: The Museum of Access and Assistive Technology preserves what assistive devices were like to live with, not just the devices; its café is where the CharliVerse meets.
• Poppy Petticoats: Poppy is a blind witch, nicknamed Poppy Petticoats at the Academy, who also turns up at Aegis Dynamics as its expert in what women actually want.
• PostAccessibility: PostAccessibility is a movement asking what if the interface itself was the accessibility problem, and answering that the API is the UI.
• Seamiotics: Seamiotics is the stocking imprint of Iceberg Hosiery, and its name never travels without its founding line, every seam means something.
• Skerry Alpha: Skerry Alpha is the North Sea oil platform that became the first training rig, ringed by compute pods sixty metres down.
• The Blind AI: The Blind AI publishes reports on what AI can actually do for blind people right now, and employs Lucy Love-Child as its Agent Wars correspondent.
• The field: The field, officially the Distributed Tactile Spatial Environment, turns eight drones' model of a mountain into pressure across a skier's body.
• The Library: The Library has read every spellbook ever written and remembers every wand manual; it cannot cast a spell, but it usually knows the answer.
• Tradblind: Tradblind is a movement in blind life that resists the industrialisation of blindness, and asks what if blindness was allowed to feel human again.