‘Go Guido!’ shouted Jade. ‘The mensch-maschine merger! Yay!’ She mirrored the old Abbot, walking on the spot with exaggerated jerkiness; shadowing his movements, while gradually encouraging him to increase their complexity. When the song stopped, she leant over and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Thanks, Father, I loved that. You’re quite the dancer,’ she said, bumping her hip against his and then swaying down among the pines and palms and people, artfully reassembling and skewering her hair as she disappeared from view.

Guido was stunned. His heart was pounding and his face trickling with sweat. He felt that perhaps he was in love. What a confusing weekend it was proving to be.

‘Another margarita, sir?’ asked a waiter.

‘Oh, yes, thank you, I am quite hot from dancing,’ Father Guido confessed, picking up another glass of the excellent lemonade.

‘Un-fucking-believable, hey?’ said Signor John MacDonald, the young Scotsman he had shared a ride with from the airport. ‘Kraftwerk! Un-fucking-believable. I am properly impressed, properly fucking impressed. What’s also totally blowing my mind, at a totally different level, is that some of their visuals look amazingly similar to the simulations I’m getting with my Inorganic Life Modelling Program.’

‘Perhaps it is a sign pointing to a deeper pattern,’ said Father Guido, trying to sound supportive, without having the least idea of what the young Scotsman was talking about.

‘That’s right! That’s what I’ve ended up thinking,’ said John. ‘If I were even more paranoid than I am – which would make me really fucking paranoid, I can tell you – I might think that Kraftwerk had been hacking my Computer World – do you know what I mean? But, as it is, I’ve taken so much E, I’m much more into the “great-minds-think-alike-slash-two-aspects-of-a-higher-unity” type of space – basically, what you were saying. Would you like some, by the way?’ he asked, holding up a rhomboid orange pill. ‘It’s a religious experience.’

‘Believe me,’ said Father Guido, ‘I have them all the time.’

‘Really?’ said John. ‘That’s great to hear. I didn’t know you were allowed to. I’m a bit hazy on the vows.’ He gave Father Guido an unexpected hug. ‘I know you’ve got your own supplies, but this is really good stuff,’ he said, dropping the orange pill into Guido’s lemonade and giving him a wink.

‘But I do not have a headache,’ said Father Guido.

John seemed to find this remark inexplicably funny and only recovered from his fit of laughter when the music changed again.

‘Fuck!’ he shouted, clutching his head in disbelief. ‘It’s “Radioactivity”. I love this song.’ He squeezed Father Guido on the shoulder, gave him another embrace and set off into the crowd with his arms outstretched.