‘Well, you are so kind. It is very refreshing. Thank you,’ said Father Guido, taking another glass and wandering towards the double staircase that led into the garden from a terrace on the far side of the hall. As he approached the branching steps, the music grew louder and a screen gradually appeared, perhaps a hundred metres from the house, seething and twisting with lurid green numbers. Four figures silhouetted against the giant screen, in black costumes ribbed with strips of light, stood behind sharply delineated consoles on which they made delicate adjustments to invisible instruments. Father Guido walked down the steps in a trance, unable to work out whether he was attending a concert or some sort of science presentation about the robot future that Signor Sterling and his associates were planning to unleash on to the public. Suddenly, COMPUTERWORLD appeared on the screen. That must be the name of the product. Next, a series of huge words appeared, while at the same time being spoken by a portentous, half-human, half-synthesised voice: INTERPOL/ DEUTSCHE BANK/ FBI /SCOTLAND YARD/ CIA/ KGB/ CONTROL DATA/ MEMORY/ COMMUNICATION/ TIME/ MEDICINE/ ENTERTAINMENT. It was clearly a product with a list of powerful clients and a wide range of applications, but what really moved Father Guido were the vibrant irregular patterns of colour that started to dance around the screen, sometimes in sync with the underlying beat of the music, and sometimes with the long breaths and plangent echoes that shimmered and stretched over the frenetic bass. Father Guido drained his second glass of lemonade and looked on with amazement. He was reminded of the ever-changing combinations of tumbling stained-glass fragments in the rotating kaleidoscope his mother had given him for his sixth birthday.

‘Infernal racket,’ shouted a familiar voice in Father Guido’s ear. It was Sir William Moorhead. ‘I suppose we can at least agree on that!’

‘It reminds me of stained glass,’ said the enchanted Abbot, ‘but modernised, of course, for young people.’

‘These Krauts have been pretending to be robots for at least half a century. It’s retro-futurism rather than modernity,’ said Moorhead witheringly. ‘I think you’ll find Soviet poster art, medical monitors and musical visualisation have had a rather larger influence on their work than the rose window in Amiens Cathedral.’