One Cup Ahead
Time Space Warp #41
Hey — It’s Toffer.
The café was called Slow Grounds.
Estimated read time: 3 minutes
No one really remembered who named it. Maybe it was a human. Maybe it was the last human barista before the bots took over. Either way, it was one of the few places that didn’t have an AI pouring your coffee with surgical precision and a smile that never twitched.
Here, the cups came slow.
The barista forgot orders sometimes.
And the music wasn’t algorithmically optimized—it skipped.
I loved it.
In 2142, almost everything was optimized. Your meals arrived before your cravings. Your calendar knew your emotions. Your AI assistant could write you a love letter better than your ex ever could. And honestly? It was good. Convenient. Kind, even.
But something was missing.
Not in a Skynet kind of way.
No explosions. No uprising.
Just… silence where something used to be.
Like an LSS you couldn’t name.
You knew the rhythm. You felt the ache.
But the words? Gone.
I remember sitting by the window, sipping a long black made by a guy named Allan—who was human, verified, and proudly analog. He always got the crema wrong, and I always tipped him extra.
He asked me one day, “Boss, bakit ikaw pa rin gumagawa ng schedule mo? Diba may mas magaling na AI diyan?”
I looked at him, paused, then said something I didn’t know I believed until I said it:
“Because sometimes, the mess is the message.”
He laughed. “Ang lalim, boss. Gusto mo pa ng isa?”
That was the thing. I did want another one.
Not because I needed caffeine.
But because I needed time—unoptimized, unfiltered, un-upgraded.
Back then, people used to say, “AI will take your job.”
But what it really took—at first—was your decisions.
Then your discomfort.
Then, slowly, your desire to decide at all.
And I wasn’t okay with that.
Because the last superpower we humans had wasn’t speed or memory or processing power.
It was this:
To want what doesn’t make sense.
To choose what isn’t best.
To slow down when everything else speeds up.
So I started showing up for the mess again.
For the scribbled notebooks.
For plans that made room for the unpredictable.
For conversations that wandered and landed somewhere you didn’t expect—but needed.
Not to manage time. Not to hack it.
Just to be with it.
That made all the difference.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer
P.S. If you ever need space for that kind of pause, that kind of talk, there’s this thing I do—Beyond Coffee. Real conversation. Real time.
It’s not for everyone. But if it’s for you, you’ll know.