Via Břeclav to Katowice and Poznań. That is the way of the samurai.

As the first train got moving, a flushed guy with a backpack squeezed into the seat opposite me. In American English he asked the conductor for a ticket to Budapest. And to pay by card.

“I can only sell you a ticket to the Slovak border,” came the reply in Moravian English. “In crowns. In Slovakia the crew can sell you a ticket to the border with Hungary. There you’ll need euros. Then in Hungary you’ll pay for the rest. In forints.”

The guy looked as if he’d have expected to encounter a bear in a fez playing the dulcimer on a direct train to Budapest rather than this.

For a moment I observed this war of the worlds with interest. When the option that the police would remove him from the train at Břeclav for fare-dodging came into play, I stepped in.

“I don’t suppose you know how to use bitcoin.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said the guy.

“I’ve got crowns and euros. You’ll be able to exchange euros for forints with somebody here. I’ll give you the address of my wallet. When you arrive, you can send me the money.”

After the business transaction and an endless round of thanks, the guy revealed that he was from Boston and had flown to Europe for his gap year.

“I thought you’d done away with borders here,” he said, taking in the experience.

I shrugged. “They tried.”

Two transfers, seven hundred kilometres and countless shifts behind the wheel of a truck in Euro Truck Simulator later, I finally waddled off the train on travel-numbed legs.

The same Airbnb flat awaited me in Poznań as in Barcelona in the spring, London in the winter and Tel Aviv in the autumn. I unlocked the door by tapping in a code from my mobile. Shiny parquet flooring, a sofa-bed, two folding chairs by a miniature dining table on which stood a bottle of Merlot.

I stuck my phone in the socket and went through the nearest cafes. Once again, the same porno photos of quiches, soups and filter coffee evaporating from glass pots, rising towards ceiling lights made of black-lacquered sheet metal.

Everyone always talked about my business trips with undisguised envy. You’ve seen the whole world! For free! All expenses paid! But I hadn’t seen the world, all I’d seen was the same giant city scattered across the corners of the planet in little pieces. The same airport and station arrivals halls, the same dark-skinned, big-mouthed taxi-drivers, the same conference rooms filled with people cloned by Zaha Hadid so that they don’t ruin the aesthetic effect. The same overnight apartments – the only thing that changed was the castles and churches somewhere far outside the window. Even if I happened to have a couple of hours left to go and see them, I still preferred to read about them on Wikipedia in bed – I learned more that way than I would have from the twenty-euro tours and I didn’t have to put up with Americans wetting themselves about how they were finally seeing a building older than their grandma.

It really sucks. Just when I started to have the money and time to travel, travelling had no chance of satisfying my curiosity. Getting somewhere that doesn’t look the same as everywhere else is an increasingly challenging quest. How to get hold of bog roll in Venezuela: you can’t just go out and buy it, you have to know someone. Markéta had taken me further in five minutes by taxi than the airbus had on an eight-hour flight over the Atlantic.

I wondered what the Boss was doing on the other side of the ocean. Burning a giant offering under the million stars of the Nevada desert and lighting a giant spliff rolled by Elon Musk. “Have you ever seen anything like this, brother?” – “I haven’t, brother. But it’s nothing compared to the cathedral we’re building together.”

Poznań gives you both the finger.

In the café I opened up Tinder. Third time unified: leaps of joy up towards the sun on beaches and mountain tops, studio photos by bunglers who mask skin defects with overexposure, brooding portraits from the concrete aisles of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin – there was at least one on Tinder for every person gassed.

I had preconceptions about the Iran of Europe, but even though I came across a few profiles with the warning fuck friends, nie szukam or nie interesuji mnie przypadkowe znajomości, the vast majority were variations on the promises open minded, free spirit. That plane near Smolensk wasn’t Russian sabotage but divine retribution.

Modesta was the only one who started writing and sending me photos of her own accord. On her beautiful stomach she had written in marker pen: licz swoje błogosławieństwa. And she wanted to meet up the next evening.

It looked almost too good for it to turn out well.

The morning launch of the conference on the video-game industry had been entrusted to some big shot from city hall. In his thick grey suit jacket, he was sweating like a beast. It dripped from his forehead onto the paper with his generic speech: our city is proud to welcome… in this turbulent time it is especially important to… responses to the challenges posed by new… our most valuable resource is people and their potential…

“I hope that this event will contribute greatly towards moving creativity forward,” he concluded, and perhaps he really did sincerely wish it.

It’s always a moving spectacle when someone who has to download a birthday message for his wife from the internet talks about creativity. When civil servants and managers attempt to tame something that can’t be tamed, mass-produce one-offs, mine a rich seam of brilliant ideas into the central region of a Gaussian curve.

On the one hand, all this attention focused on my brain made me miserable: they wanted to turn me into a row in an Excel spreadsheet, a reliable component of a GDP machine, bleed me dry and eventually tip me out into an artificial neural network that will do my work without procrastinating, 24/7. On the other hand, it had secured me a place on a pedestal before the age of thirty. People look up to us programmers the way they must have once looked up to soldiers, preachers or cosmonauts.

We bring the promise of a better tomorrow – and it inflates our salaries to several times the average. We are the human race of tomorrow – literally, because the only ones in greater demand on Tinder are pilots and surgeons.

When a blonde besuited MILF finished her piece about support for gaming start-ups from EU funds, I was given a head mic, ran onto the stage and for twenty minutes showed them how we do it. All of our games share most of their code with each other, so when we make improvements to Yuina’s Sushi, then Adrian’s Pizza also starts working according to the new mechanism. That’s one of the reasons why the eleven of us have managed an average growth of fifteen per cent a month for the second year in a row. I boasted about how we can profile players according to their Facebook likes and then get them to spend: when we produce a flurry of white characters for Pink Floyd listeners, they’re much more willing to pay for virtual workers in the game using a real credit card than when we send them black ones. With Kanye West fans, it’s the other way round. We know more about our players than they know about themselves.

“So that’s how we cook up the cooks,” I finished with a play on words which seemed dumb to me even as I said it but didn’t stop the applause from coming.

In the foyer I checked the conference’s hashtag on Twitter: appreciative and enthusiastic messages popped up one after the other. Mission accomplished. That just left the obligatory networking.

Before I’d had a chance to take a proper look around the hall, I was approached by several people from investment funds. I referred all of them to the Boss’s assistant, hoping nothing would come of it, because every new associate brings changes, and I don’t like change.

But I do like meat. I loaded up a plate with chicken roulades at the buffet and went off to stand by a small table, where a tall redhead on her own was gorging on canapes.

“You’re that developer who does Ronald’s Burgers,” she told me drily like face-recognition software. I nodded.

“You really piss me off, man. The last few weeks I’ve spent entire days at the computer frying meat and flipping buns instead of concentrating on what they pay me for.”

“So I’m doing my job well.”

“Too well! You’d be more useful if you did it a bit worse. Or didn’t do it at all. That’d be best of all.”

We both laughed.

“And what exactly do you do when you’re not frying burgers?”

“Developer. Do you know Euro Truck Simulator?”

“Jesus Christ, of course I do!”

“Well, that’s my baby.”

Though I don’t generally think about my life much and tend to just take things as they come, I keep going back to this moment. Two people who have been distracting each other from their work at a distance for months without being aware of each other’s existence meet in a foreign city. In a situation that I freely grant writers of romantic comedies the use of.

“When are you in Poznań till?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“And have you got plans for after it finishes here today?”

It was enough to make you start believing in omens. A good-looking girl, from the same line of work, who I had been connected to by an invisible procrastinating bond for a long time, wanted to know what I was doing that evening. It was too good an offer to refuse.

Unless. Unless I had a phone full of promising messages and photos from Modesta. Unless that evening was my first and last chance to meet up with her, whereas with Miss Euro Truck Simulator our work was bound to bring us together again. I really needed to put an end to a run of bad luck and right then Modesta looked like a more reliable supplier of pussy.

“I have.”

“Pity.”

I was soon to find out that I hadn’t just chosen who to spend the evening with, but what the rest of my life would be like.

We met in a small restaurant in the centre of Poznań. Modesta turned up in a long black dress, blonde hair covered by a scarf. She looked just like her name: no warpaint, no jewellery, nothing superfluous, modesty itself and perfect in that modesty.

She ordered the cheapest pasta dish and asked for tap water. I was intrigued that she could sleep with a stranger without getting drunk first. I had never seen anyone like her before. I treated myself to a steak and Malbec.

When the waiter took the menus away, we exchanged a few polite sentences about how long it had taken to get to Poznań and how nice the weather was for this time of year. Whereas in her messages Modesta had come across as supremely confident, in person she was timid and tiptoed carefully through the conversation as if she wanted to broach an unpleasant topic and didn’t know how. Had she got her period on the way here and was now embarrassed about backing out? Did her bloke want to watch while we did it?

“I have an important message for you,” she said after an awkward pause.

I nodded that I was listening.

“There is someone here who loves you.”

What?

“Someone who is the alpha and omega. The Lord of all ages.”

Great. Just my luck – from the whole of Poland, I end up with a girl with delusions.

“Christ. Christ loves you.”

Oh, him.

“You’re walking the broad road to perdition. I’ve come to show you the narrow path to heaven.”

But I’d really been looking forward to that perdition. I’d even refrained from touching my cock all day to make sure it didn’t let me down again.

“Did you arrange to meet me just so you could convert me?” I said, trying to make sense of a confusing situation.

“I arranged to meet you so I could lead you towards a real life. So I could prepare the way for the Lord, smooth his path into your heart…”

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Because I want to help you to escape the void you were trying to take refuge from with me for a couple of hours.”

“I’m not taking refuge from a void. I just wanted to have a fun evening.”

“Call it what you want: boredom, routine, tedium. You’re not exactly living a full life, are you?”

“You know fuck all about my life.” I slapped my palm against the table.

“I know enough about it. I lived the same way.”

“I doubt it.”

She leaned towards my hand.

“You don’t do much physical work, do you? I can tell by your nails.”

“You could say that,” I admitted. “I’m in programming.”

“I was an analyst in a bank.”

“That sounds good.”

“Exactly. It sounds good. You stare at spreadsheets, no hard graft, six weeks’ holiday, English courses and gym paid for. But then one day at work it occurs to you to say out loud what exactly it is you’re doing. Right now I’m taking a family’s house away from them. Now a firm’s machines and its employees’ jobs. So maybe their houses as well. If I’m smart, perhaps one day I’ll click up a small famine somewhere with my mouse. Or at least a riot.”

“A job like any other. Why didn’t you stick with it?”

“Because I had to get it out of my system every evening. Drag someone home from a bar. Get my brains fucked out. Forget about it all for a few hours. And in the morning start all over again.”

“People live worse lives.”

“It wasn’t a life. That’s what I found in Christ. Now I’m repaying him by leading people like you to him.”

The waiter brought the Malbec and water. I snatched the wine out of his hand and took a swig. This pious bitch had caught me unawares.

“Well, I like the fact you’ve got guts,” I admitted. “It takes nerve to think that this kind of ambush could work.”

“It’s not nerve. It’s data. In July we had a conversion rate of 24%. Thanks to us, one in four of the blind can see. And we’re growing from month to month.”

I came alive again. This girl was full of surprises.

“We? Thanks to us? There are more of you?”

“Hundreds. In Europe, in South America, and since September in the Philippines too.”

“Wow. I remember a time when you Jehovah’s Witnesses went from door to door. And suddenly Tinder.”

“But we’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses. We’re members of a monastic order. Catholics.”

For a moment I stared at her in disbelief. It hadn’t occurred to me that a nun’s job description could include more than just changing the nappies of bedridden patients.

“The Pope is paying for this sideshow?”

“You may have noticed that the Holy Father Francis is very progressive in some ways.”

“He’s cool. He’s got Twitter and stuff.”

“Exactly. He set up the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Institute for new media.”

“And I have a date with a nun through Tinder.”

“You have a date with Christ. Who is being represented by me, Sister Modesta from the order Swipe Right for Christ.”

I knocked back the rest of the Malbec.

After we’d eaten, Modesta handed me a few leaflets. One was an invitation to alpha courses: in the middle was a big question mark with questions coming out on every side: Who is Jesus? Why did Jesus die? How can I find faith? How does God guide us? How can I resist evil? On the next leaflet a poverty-stricken Arab was warming a small child under a sweatshirt. Underneath it said: “Reach out a hand to people on the run, reach out a hand to Christ.” Below that in smaller print were contact details for those interested in becoming volunteers at refugee camps in the south of Europe.

“This year alone, hundreds of thousands of them have come, maybe even a million,” she piped up. “In Italy, Greece, Serbia. Without food or clothes, having walked a thousand kilometres. Promise me you won’t throw it away.”

I promised I wouldn’t throw it away.

Modesta asked the waiter for the bill. I reached into my bag for my wallet.

“Put it away. I’m paying,” she said.

“Aren’t you kind of extravagant for a nun?”

“We have a generous budget. Thanks to that conversion rate. It turns out that Tinder users are not just hungry for sex but also for something much more profound. Something to satisfy them for their whole life, not for fifteen minutes. So to save one soul it works out cheaper to buy steak and wine for four people like you than send missionaries to the jungle by plane.”

I didn’t feel like going home. I was curious what else had escaped my notice in this line of work. Churches in Minecraft? Sermons on Pornhub? Athlete in loincloth fucks with the Devil?

“Shall we go on somewhere else?” I asked. “I’ll be the perfect gentleman, if that’s the way it has to be.”

“I can’t. My next appointment starts in half an hour.”

“You’re going on another date?”

“Three more. I’ve got the night shift today.”

“Christ’s a pretty demanding boss.”

“Husband,” she corrected me.

 

Translated by Graeme Dibble