There was one building obviously not owned by the locals. It was a tent in camouflage green, with a Red Cross painted brightly on the canvas. Familiar from too many disaster-zone news reports, it was an ominous sight.

Somebody screamed, so loud it hurt my ears before muffling filters cut in.

A little girl was standing before me. She was just a bundle, almost lost in an oversized parka. Her face was a round, ruddy ball, streaked with tears, and she was staring at my feet. A woman came and scooped her up, glaring at me.

And as I watched the woman walk away I noticed a row of body bags on the ground, all neatly zipped up.

“Hey, you!” It was a crisp summons in an American accent, west coast perhaps.

A woman walked toward me in a space suit — or anyhow that’s what it looked like, a bright blue coverall marked with UN relief agency logos. But she had her masked hood open and pushed back from her head. She was black, late twenties maybe, a severe expression on her small face. “You shouldn’t be out here with so much exposed flesh,” she snapped at me now. “Haven’t you heard of tick-borne encephalitis? And how did you get here anyhow?”

“I’m not really here,” I said. I reached out as if to shake her hand. She responded automatically, offering me her own gloved hand; my hand passed through hers, briefly breaking up into a cloud of boxy pixels, and a protocol-violation warning pinged in my ear.

“Oh, a VR,” she said, her urgency morphing smoothly to contempt. “What are you, some kind of Bottlenecker? A ghoul, come to see the dead people?”

Her words chilled me. “I’m no disaster-tourist—”

“Then show some consideration.” She pointed to my feet.

Looking down I realized what had upset the little girl so much. I was hovering a few centimeters above the ground surface; no wonder the kid was spooked. I hastily issued system commands, and I sank down to the ground.

The soldier turned to go. Evidently she didn’t have time to waste on the likes of me.

I hurried after her. I wished I could grab her arm to get her attention. “Please,” I said. “I’m looking for my son.”

She slowed, and looked at me again. Her name was Sonia Dameyer, I read from a tag on her chest, Major Sonia Dameyer of the U.S. Army. She was a familiar sight, an American soldier dressed in a space suit in some godforsaken corner of the planet, like most of her kind nowadays devoted to rescue work and peacekeeping rather than war-fighting. “Your son was here in person, through the burp?”

“The what?… Yes, he was here. I heard he was alive, but maybe hurt, I don’t know anything else. His name is Tom Poole.”

Her eyes widened. “Tom. The hero.”

She said this gently, but it was not what you want to hear about your missing child. I was dimly aware of my body, my real body, immersed in a body-temperature fluid and mildly anesthetized, churning in the dark, as if I were having a bad dream. “Do you know where he is?”

“This way.” She turned toward that big hospital tent.

I followed. My VR steps felt very heavy.

We walked into the tent. We had to pass through a kind of bubble airlock, inflated from clear plastic. Of course I could just walk through the walls, but Dameyer lifted the flaps for me, and I followed protocol. Inside it was dark; my vision blinked and juddered. But my VR eyes responded to the changed light levels as fast as a camera aperture dilating open.

When I could see, I looked around wildly at rows of fold-out canvas beds. Med robots, clumsy gear-laden trolleys, whirred self-importantly. Most of the patients wore oxygen masks, and drips snaked into arms. I couldn’t see too many signs of traumatic injuries, no broken legs or crushed ribs. They looked like victims of a poisoning, or a gas attack, like the London underground incident in the 2020s. Not that I’m an expert on medical emergencies. The patients were all adults — and obviously not locals; this whole setup was sent in by the Western powers to tend for their own.

My vision shattered again. I shook my head, as if that was going to help. “Damn it.”

“The trouble,” came a weak voice, “is the tent. Partial Faraday cage woven into the fabric. It might be the UN but this is a military operation, Dad…”

I whirled. It was Tom, that familiar face staring up at me from a green military-issue pillow. I could barely even see him.

It was a tough moment. As a VR you can’t cry, not with the cheap software John had hired for me anyway. But I was crying, that overweight, out-of-condition body floating in a tank in downtown Miami like a baby in a womb crying its embryonic heart out. Not only that, my comms link kept crashing, so that Tom’s image would break up into planes and shadows, as if he was the one who wasn’t really there, rather than me. I tried to hug him. I closed my arms on empty air while protocol warnings pinged. How sad is that?

Tom was bound to disapprove of the way I’d come running out here after him. The logic of our father-son relationship would allow nothing less. But, in the gloom of that hospital tent, as I fumbled to make contact with him, his expression was soft — not welcoming, but at least forgiving. In his way, I thought, he was glad to see me.

After a few minutes of this farce, the doctor attending Tom ordered me out of there as I was distracting the other patients. But he took pity on us. Tom’s “dose” had been light, he said, and though Tom still needed bedrest he could leave the field hospital.

So Tom swung his legs out of his bed, and a med-bot helped him pull on his trousers and jacket.

Carrying only a light oxygen pack, with the mask loose around his neck, he limped slowly out of the tent. I longed to support him, but of course I couldn’t. Instead he allowed Major Sonia Dameyer to take his arm.

She walked him all the way to one of those mud-covered teepeelike buildings, and helped him through the low doorway with its leathery flap. Inside, a dirt floor was covered by rugs of some kind of animal skin, very old and worn with use. There were three grass-stuffed pallets, and a stack of cooking pots. The only significant piece of furniture was a big old trunk, firmly padlocked: the family treasure of a nomadic people. My systems brought me a stink of stale cooking fat.

There was one occupant, a local, a boy in a cut-down military-looking parka jacket. Aged maybe twelve, thirteen, he was forking his way through an open tin of baby carrots. When we came in — injured Tom with his oxygen mask, Sonia in her space suit, and me, a VR ghost — the kid, wide-eyed, tried to push past Sonia and run. Tom spoke to the kid softly. The kid answered before running out, though not without another spooked stare at Sonia and me.

Tom eased his way painfully down onto one of the pallets. He clutched his chest as if it hurt. Somewhat to my surprise, Sonia settled down on a pallet near Tom.

I asked, “You two know each other?”

“Not before the burp,” Tom said.

Sonia said, “It’s advisable for Tom to have some protection. Some of the locals take it out on the Westerners. Even aid workers like Tom.”

“Well, you can understand it,” Tom said. He wheezed slightly, as if he’d suddenly turned into a turn-of-the-century heavy smoker; it was a lung rattle you didn’t hear anymore. “The locals have a difficult time of it, Dad. Even before the Warming the industries in the area made a mess of everything. You must have seen the plant a couple of klicks away. Even in the last century you had oil spills, the rivers killed by waste, the ground melting around the factories—”

I wanted to scream at him. “Just for once,” I said, “can’t we talk about you and not the state of the damn planet?”

Tom stiffened. “It’s why I’m here in the first place.”

Sonia Dameyer just watched this exchange, an amused expression on her face.