Ricardo sat hunched over his crumpled rucksack on the train. In his hands was a crumpled paper with an address, the letterhead boasting the words 'The Noah Project'. He had laughed when he had first seen the name, thinking of all the animals marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. His little girl loved the story of Noah, two of every creature, six by six, seven by seven, hurrah, hurrah. The wasp, the ant, the bumblebee. 'Honey girl,' he said to his daughter, 'of course they have to bring wasps'. She'd been stung by in the awful heatwave of '22, right on the lip. It had been writhing in the sugary soda left around the rim of the can. He had rushed her to the emergency department and waited seven hours in the heat to be seen, by which time her lip had swollen like a botoxed gorilla. His ex wife was not happy, arguing that he should have been more attentive. The following year, she never came back from a trip to Spain, caught, he presumed, the Iberian Peninsula fires that rushed through Portugal and Spain and killed thousands. His daughter - well, he didn't want to think about that. He wasn't the only one to lose loved ones due to the dog flu in '24. It seemed it was always one thing or another. Shoot all the dogs, sure, and then there will be something else. Bats, frogs, mosquitos. Giant fucking Scottish midges. Rabid giraffes. Whatever.

The train edged forward slowly and cautiously, as if reluctant to do it's job at all. Ricardo couldn't blame the train - he barely wanted to get out of bed most mornings. But that's what coffee was for. He found humanity could cope with most things. Disease, war, famine. Tik Tok. Having to swathe oneself in a shit-ton of sunscreen before leaving the house. The lack of tempranillo or trips to Malaga because everything had been burnt to a crisp and the corpses washing up on the beaches took away the pleasant vibe. But take away one's right to a macchiato with a swirl of warm milk applied with flourish, and you had a riot on your hands.

It used to irritate him no end that people advocated for small carbon footprints but had no problem at all with take away coffee cups. 'Don't sweat that stuff', his boss used to say. 'Just sell the beans'. And so he did, even as they got more expensive and harder to get. His job role changed a little. He become more of a black market dealer than a conventional coffee salesperson. In conversations he would describe himself as a bean pirate. To get laid it was easy - simply place a good Yirgacheffe bean with a hint of dark chocolate and roast coconut under her nose and you'd have her drooling. Even a bog standard Arabica would do. If she was lucky he would have a bag of green in and would roast them himself, handing her a perfect cup in the morning. But they were harder to come by.

By the time the train pulled into London Town the heat had changed a little, the night air tempering the intensity of the day. The address he had been given led him to a lovely detached house on the Thames in Richmond. How nice it was for some. How awfully terrible it was for everyone else.

'You're late' his contact noted. Ricardo bristled, fingering the oily dark beans in his pocket.

'Do we have a place on the ark?'. There was no need for small talk. What would they talk about? The disappearance of the Maldives? The billions drowned in Bangledesh? The rolling blackouts? The collapse of America?

'Can you get us the shipment? Will it be here in time?' Dominic was the Chief Officer of ensuring life on fucking earth ended up on another fucking planet or some such. It's one thing to get the one percent off this dying planet, and another to make sure they have something to eat when they got there. Yay for anyone who was anyone in botanical sciences or masters of agriculture, Elon Musk, a few attractive celebrities, many rich pollies, world class engineers and a select cleaning and shitkicking team. Not so yay for the masses in earth that would look up and see the Noah Project ships leave, and know they'd been abandoned to their collective fate as victims of a cosmic joke. Why were they born on the tail end of humanity's attempt at life?

Ricardo pulled out a small plastic bag from his rucksack. Dominic almost snatched it from his hands, opening it on the way to the kitchen and promptly making an expresso for them both. Sipping, he closed his eyes, leaning against the cold granite benchtop like a man who'd just had a snort of charlie and was in a momentary ecstasy.

'I have a truckload of beans ready to get to the Project' Ricardo coaxed, taking advantage of that moment where the smooth dark creaminess of the roast started to fly through the man's veins. He knew an addict when he saw one. 'I also have enough coffee cherries to get a crop started on board. Three, four years, you'll be making your own coffee.'

'How much you asking?'. Dominic was a man of the old world, who thought fiat was the only currency. Ricardo tried very hard not to make the man seem a fool.

'I want to come with the beans'. No point pulling punches. If he was going to die it may as well be hurtling through space to another habitable planet. He imagined sipping a short mac watching the stars. He reckoned he could forget at a distance. Here he was too close to the brutality. The memories. His little girl running through the warehouse where the roasting machines roared. Teaching her to count with teaspoons and beans. Babycinos and chocolate milk moustaches.

Dominic put down his mug gently. A thick band of crema ringed the insides of it's ceramic whiteness.

'Tickets aren't cheap, chum" he said quietly. 'What makes you think we can't locate your magic beans? We may have lost the earth but our surveillance skills are still rather class.' Dominic gently wound the plastic bag of remaining grounds into a cylinder and twiddled a red rubber band tightly around it's scant bulk. 'You're coming at me with a save the beans, save me kinda deal? Think I've not heard similiar?'.

Ricardo shrugged. Dominic didn't yet know his six year old son was held hostage in an underground train station in East London, asleep and blanketed in coffee sacks. There were ways and means to get what he wanted.

'Save me, save the beans' Ricardo shrugged. 'Sounds good. You want sugar with that?' he smiled, handing the man the phone where his singular offspring was just the ransom needed to save the world's coffee.

'Extinction"s going to be a rough trip without a cuppa java, chum.' Ricardo smiled, the bitter taste of the brew still on his tongue. He'd leave with a ticket in his pocket alright. In a fortnight he'd be on the ark, watching the lost coffee plantations of earth burn from a safe distance.

'No me, no latte'. Ricardo said. No qualms. No guilt. They'd thank him later. A Starbucks in the stars was going to make a hero of him one day. Getting his hands dirty was a necessary evil.

With Love,

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