Emma Heart

Canon. This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

Emma Heart is a British alpine skier, and the first totally blind athlete to race Paralympic Super-G without a human guide. At the 2038 Winter Paralympics in Sion she won it, in a Paralympic record of 1:31.01, by 5.71 seconds.

She grew up near Aviemore and began skiing at five. By fourteen she was competing nationally, regarded as a promising technical skier rather than a likely speed specialist. At sixteen, an autoimmune inflammation damaged both optic nerves over eleven days, and she left hospital with no useful vision. For almost a year she refused to discuss skiing. Then, at seventeen, she met Daniel Reed, and they became one of Britain's most successful development pairs. She competes in the B1 class, for athletes with no functional vision.

Sion, 2038

Emma raced twice in a week.

Downhill: with Daniel guiding, silver, 0.31 seconds behind Austria's Lina Weiss and Klara Moser. "We wanted gold, so there is a bit of me that is furious. But Daniel and I are Paralympic silver medallists. I can be furious tomorrow."
Super-G: with no guide ahead of her, only eight drones and the field. Gold, and a run at 87.9 per cent of the average speed of the sighted Olympic champion on the equivalent course.

The margin started an argument about what she had won. Emma had asked the question herself the night before anyone else did: "If I race them again, and we all know the field is faster, what exactly am I proving?"

In her own words

On the field: "It doesn't look like anything. I remember sight. This isn't sight. It is more like having skin that reaches further away."
On being evidence: "I am not PostAccessibility's moon landing. I am also not personally ending human connection."
On choice: "I don't want every blind skier to do this. I want every blind skier who can do this and wants to do it to have the choice."
On freedom: "I can make the wrong decision entirely by myself."
On Daniel being called middleware, which she has banned in her presence: "He is much too annoying."

After Sion

She sits on the international standards board for non-visual interfaces, alongside Daniel Okafor, whose sonification began as a different answer to the same question as her field. "Daniel hears the sea, I feel the mountain. Neither of us is seeing anything. That was always the point." On the board's membership she is less diplomatic: "I have spent my entire career being told where to go by men called Daniel. At least this one only tells me what he can hear."

What she wants next

Not another medal. She wants the field approved for an ordinary public slope, so she can keep a promise she made before she lost her sight: to teach her wife to ski. Not to be guided by her; to teach her, and to be the experienced skier in their marriage. "Sometimes independence means being able to decide who the day belongs to."

Her wife is not part of the public story. She agreed Emma could tell the world about the promise. She did not agree to become content.

Behind the scenes

Emma Heart is the centre of Heart Attacks, a design fiction by Charlotte Joanne published at Blind Ant: a feature, a news report and two short stories set at the 2038 Winter Paralympics. She appears again in "Dyson Shoal", part of Oil Rigs to Training Rigs.