She married me, I think, for my looks she always had a taste for looks in men. I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber, and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her, her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self-all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It must have been shut in there for days.Įventually it ran out, or down. It went off looking for her, humming softly. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket. Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid you had to be a little careful around it it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light, and the tone of her voice. And so its name fit all around: One of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless fight. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. No, it was her first husband-an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death.
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