Freeing the Beast

A Tasteless Legacy (1)

Astrid

    The professor has asked us to write about a significant individual who has altered the world and has made history with either their theory, perspiration or creation. A lot of my classmates have chosen to write their paper on deceased and obvious individuals like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or Steve Jobs; But I've chosen differently. I've chosen someone who's alive.

I've chosen to write my paper on Theodore Clear, or rather, on the Clear family.

A very influential family that is practically worshiped, they're responsible for MA, the greatest tool a human being can possess in a dire time of need. It has saved many lives, and people are grateful for its existence, as they should be.

Taking a deep breath as I'm lying on my stomach on the bed with my laptop sitting in front of my face, I feel unsatisfied with the words I've written.

I stop my nervous habit of joining my fingers together and rubbing them relentlessly and start to focus on re-reading my paper. Thinking for the second time that it sounds too stiff and more like something I have collected from Wikipedia.

I minimize the word document tab and return to reading an auto-biography about the Clear family;

Vera Clear was born Vera Kulyk, in nineteen-seventy-three, by two Ukrainian parents in the Soviet Union.

The striking blonde beauty left her native country to come to America to pursue a modeling career.

After a few years working as a model, she met Artur Ismaylov, a Russian politician, and they get married while she was still in her early twenties.

She got pregnant with her first and only daughter Tatiana Ismaylova before their sudden divorce in nineteen-ninety-five.

Already a well-named model in the US, her modeling career started to take off in other countries, and she soon became a household name.

I shut my eyes for a moment as I pause, hating the direction of my reading, not knowing how to approach my subject.

My mind has not been fit this week. I've been too distracted and worried to write a good paper.

Fifty more thousand dollars was anonymously deposited into my bank account two days ago. This disturbs me more than the first time I discovered the added funds.

Furthermore, I've finally completed and sent out my application for that internship that I've been waiting for, for what feels like forever.

I can't stop thinking about whether or not I'll be accepted. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity that will launch my future career, and if I lose it, I won't know what to do. I'll be disappointing Mom, Stella, and myself.

If...no, when I am interning, it will be all I have for a while, because I don't actually know where the money in my bank account comes from. I constantly worry that maybe it's someone trying to frame me. Maybe I'm going to be imprisoned because I was stupid enough to use some of it.

Lately, I've found myself wishing on multiple occasions that I was taking law instead of computer science, so I would know what my first step should be when waking up to find multiple zeros that weren't there before on my bank statement.

With a head shake, I force my mind to focus on only one thing at a time. Right now, that one thing is my less-than-mediocre paper, so I reluctantly continue my reading:

Vera met Theodore Clear, the CEO of Clear Tech Enterprises, an up and coming technological company at the time, when he had already started to make a name for itself thanks to the brilliant creation of the signature R3ndall artificial intelligence.

The death of his wife and older son two years prior to meeting Vera had left him with only his younger son David. When he met Vera in early two-thousand-ten, Theodore claimed to have been a lonely man.

Although Theodore's wife Emma Voight Clear and oldest son Nolan Clear died in an explosive accident that made national news reports, he and Vera got married and have since become one of the most famous families on the planet. Together, Theodore, the CEO of Clear Tech Enterprises, Vera, an ex-model and wife of a billionaire, Tatiana Ismaylova, their actress daughter, and a son David Clear, their sports car enthusiast and racer son, form a more than impressive family profile.

I ignore the urge to scream in my pillow and groan, grabbing a fistful of my tangled hair and exhaling slowly. I beat at the keyboard keys in frustration, making a bunch of nonsensical scripts appear on the screen.

Pausing my reading, I sigh, feeling terribly uninspired. Then, as if on instinct, I return to my word document, deleting everything I spent the last two hours typing.

If I want to get at least the credits to pass this last assignment, I need to write a much better paper than this.

I need to feel what I'm writing. I know this is not the paper I want to write. Something else is calling to me, someone else. Someone's name to be exact.

As my finger taps the backspace key, deleting my useless words, my finger pauses on two words: Nolan Clear.

"Nolan Clear," I mutter absently, my brain working around the name.

The Clear family is famous, and so are the mysteries surrounding Nolan Clear. Theodore's oldest son, who allegedly went crazy on a midday evening.

Carrying a bomb on himself, Nolan caused nine deaths back in two-thousand-eight, one of which was his own mother Emma Voight Clear, Theodore Clear's wife at the time.

Nolan is barely mentioned by his family after the incident, while Emma Clear is mentioned on multiple occasions. She is portrayed as a hero to the public because she was there before the explosion and allegedly tried to stop her son from blowing up a whole building.

Now, Nolan Clear seems to be forgotten or ignored despite the media splash he caused for his family.

Slowly, as if testing myself, I type "Nolan Clear" on the search engine, beginning my research on the mystery that is Nolan Voight Clear. Theodore Clear's dead son.

His legacy is nothing more than a clinically insane bomber. Yet, everyone seems to forget that at just the age of twenty-six, he created R3ndall – a robot that can be programmed to be anything. R3ndall could be given the skills the buyer may need at times of distress, a particularly wealthy buyer may use it as just a maid or gardener, or businesses may purchase a R3ndall simply for entertainment purposes.

Nolan Clear may have died in a tasteless manner, but I'm shocked that people have chosen to dismiss the fact that he created such a useful tool that we still use today.

There's a R3ndall that was made specifically for the less fortunate and the handicapped, while another was made to specifically serve in hospitals alongside doctors and nurses.

I think that is what Nolan's legacy should entail – a man who thought of everyone else. His legacy shouldn't only include that he spontaneously combusted on a winter evening.