That would be 400 grams of coffee and I would return 1 cup of espresso. I came to my senses when the sweet voice of the girl behind the counter gave me the bill.

I grabbed my purse to take out my electronic key and paid the grocery bill. My aging hands picked up a tiny cup of coffee and taking small sips I headed to my car while the grocery guy brought me my packages.

I climbed into the back seat of the car and sighed deeply as the driver took me home. Through the window of my Mercedes I watched the chaos of the city grow more and more intense.

With my usual tired expression, I climbed the stairs as fast as my arthritic legs would allow. I walked into my room and the TV was showing the midday news report:

The world economy continues to be threatened by the accelerating increase in the gram of coffee, this has forced people to do whatever it takes to get even 50 grams of coffee a month to feed themselves. Remember that today is the 21900th day since the last banknote known to mankind disappeared. While people struggle to survive, the big businessmen and the authorities wonder where is the last banknote?

I sat back in my easy chair and leaned back as my mind traveled back exactly 60 years. When everything seemed to be prosperous and we had a very stable economy. I was about 20 years old, I had just graduated in economics and my father gave me the position of manager of the family business, one of the most important coffee companies in South America, and I went to represent the family and the continent at the world economic assembly.

I was a little nervous, but the truth was that it seemed like a meeting of multimillionaires that my father was used to have in one of the mansions in the Swiss Alps. People they call "important" because they have more money than they can quantify were in that same space, sharing the same drink that when uncorked would break the chance to feed an entire village, smoking the most expensive cigars in the world and eating spices that we will never see standing again. It was creepy to share with those people.

My father had a lot of power and the most important point of that meeting was to determine a new currency that would save the world economy. My family invested everything in "Coffee money" a project that determined that paper money would be printed with coffee and would govern the entire method of payment on the planet.

Meanwhile all over the world people had no payment system. Some nations had devalued their currency so much that we saw 1 million dollar bills. It was a frightening thing.

I was a little fearful in my chair next to my father. It seemed like the whole planet would be under the power of this new bill. My father asked for a tray containing the bill and began to tell what to me was a horror story. This banknote was very expensive to manufacture and had to sacrifice large amounts of land to obtain the minerals needed to make the paper really valuable.

According to my father's crazy idea, low-income people would disappear, but not because they would all have wealth, rather because they would not be able to have a single bill with which to buy food.

My father's comments became increasingly cruel and ruthless as the guests came over to look at the bill. Everyone was muttering about the great value of that little piece of paper. In the midst of so many curious onlookers and confusion, the bill disappeared.

Nobody saw anything. My father went to the bankrupt, he had put all his fortune in that valuable prototype banknote and with his money he also lost his head, so I took advantage of his power to establish a type of world payment with grams of coffee and instead of banknotes we would use an electronic key. All this was 60 long years ago.

The world economy was stable for a while but the big corporations are determined to make every gram of coffee harder and harder to come by.

I actually think I feel exhausted. One of these days I will close my eyes and never wake up again. I will go peacefully knowing that that cursed bill, that coffee money that my father wanted to impose never came out of my pocket.