The divorce was unexpected. An eight year old Charlie had been sent away to live with his grandparents in Leicester for the summer. As he explored museums with his grandmother and tinkered with gadgets with his grandfather, his parents were back in Brooklyn, fighting behind closed doors within the confines of their home and in their respective attorneys' offices. The distance was intentional, designed to keep Charlie far, far away from the fallout fo their divorce settlement and the messiness that came before it in spite of their best efforts to repair their relationship.

Zane and Carina Hall were well-matched from the start, he the son of of an engineer and homemaker and she the daughter of two physicians. He was the eldest son of immigrants from Kenya who had settled in Leicester, England, and she came from a modest household in Philadelphia. Zane was studying abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Carina, then a young business student. They fell in love, and fast, their courtship lasting less than a year before naieveté got the best of them and they decided that they were destined to be together forever. They were in no hurry to start a family and opted to take their time grooming their blossoming careers. Zane had the luck of the draw and was admitted to Cardozo Law School in New York, where the young couple moved after commencement. Carina worked long, stressful hours as an investment banker in order to support herself and her husband in their single income household.

Eventually, the two decided that they were ready to graduate from apartment living and into the world of home ownership. They purchased a brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the hopes of filling the house with love and a family of their own. Not long after that, they were joined by a screamer of an infant that they named Charlie. He was a fussy, colicky baby who kept his parents on their toes, but his crying fits and tantrums went away with time and soon the entire Hall household was getting a full night's sleep once again.

Charlie's childhood was unremarkable. Scrapes and snails and puppy dog tails, He got into his own fair share of trouble with his friends, but he learned to charm his way out of most situations early on, and having dimples that he could fit quarters into certainly didn't hurt. His parents' careers and wild expectations in various parts of their life took a toll on their marriage, and much to his maternal grandparents' dismay, he was shipped off to England for a summer to stay with his other set of grandparents. It was there that he was exposed to hacking and tinkering for the first time, finding that he had a great curiosity in learning how things worked, and an even greater satisfaction in taking them apart and putting them back together again, if not improving upon them with his own means.

By the time he returned to Brooklyn, his parents' divorce had been finalized and a custody agreement had been arranged. Charlie would live with his mother most of the year in the home he had grown up in, while his father moved to an apartment in Manhattan. He would spend every other weekend with Zane with alternating holidays, and summers would be split. He was caught by surprise by the big change and didn't quite understand why any of it had happened, but suddenly he had two of everything and was very quickly getting used to not hearing the word No. New toys, new video games, if he showed any interest in something, it would fall in his lap. Both parents tried handily to overcompensate for their divorce, and Zane sabotaged his own efforts to teach his son a lesson in humility, instead entertaining his every whim.

School and his friends became the only source of normalcy for Charlie, and both parents found that his temperament was easier to manage if he had a busy schedule. His mother would take him to school the morning, a babysitter would pick him up once the last bell rang, and he would be shepherded to whatever flavor of the week after school activity he was committed to at the time. Though he developed a wide range of hobbies and interests as a result, none of them stuck around for very long. He had the great fortune of being able to attend Brooklyn Tech, one of the specialized public high schools in New York, and upon the guidance of one of his science teachers, he joined the school's robotics team. It was there that he finally found his niche and excelled. He did well enough academically, and after high school, he moved to the other side of the East River as a freshman at Columbia University.

The classroom didn't hold Charlie's interest as much as it should have considering the caliber of institution that he was studying at. After taking a variety of classes early on, he quickly settled into the biomedical engineering department, finding the complex problems a fun challenge. At his grandmother's insistence, he also fulfilled teaching education requirements, which he was loathe to admit that he found interesting. The prospect of a job with ample vacation and summers off was appealing though, and after graduation, he began a job as a teacher within New York City Public Schools. He spent two years working as an elementary school teacher, and in those two years, he learned the following things: 1) teaching first and second graders meant that he could get away being a giant child at work, 2) children had a tendency to treat him as a giant playmate rather than any sort of educational or authoritative figure, and 3) parents were frustrating to work with. Charlie realized that he had to get out of the classroom setting, and a long, convoluted road eventually led him to the Museum of Science, where he currently works.