============================================================ BETTY // INFINITE Short Story by Julio Lonnie Lopez 2025 ============================================================ Betty Vasquez had a rule about psychics. She didn't believe in them. Not exactly. But she kept coming back to Celestine the way you keep picking at something that doesn't quite hurt—not because you expect it to heal, but because stopping feels worse than continuing. Celestine's office was on the second floor of a building that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. A nail salon on the ground floor. A tax preparer on the third. And in between, Celestine Abara, Spiritual Consultant, whose hand-lettered sign in the window had been slightly crooked for as long as Betty could remember and probably longer. Betty liked that about her. A fraud would have fixed the sign. She had been coming here for seven months. Long enough that Celestine no longer offered her tea, just slid the mug across the small table without ceremony. Long enough that Betty had stopped pretending she came for fun, the way she had in the beginning—oh it's just a lark, just something to write about, just a story for the group chat. She came because Celestine kept saying things that lodged themselves in Betty's chest like splinters. Small. Unreachable. Impossible to ignore. Today felt different before she even sat down. Celestine was already looking at her with that particular expression—not dramatic, not performative, just attentive in a way that made Betty want to check if she had something on her face. "You look like you already know something," Betty said, unwrapping her scarf. "I know several things." Celestine wrapped both hands around her own mug. "Sit down, Betty." Betty sat. She pulled out her notebook—a habit now, automatic, the way other people reach for their phones. Celestine watched her do it without comment. The reading began the way they always did. Past life impressions. The recurring theme of water. A previous self in what felt like northern Europe, cold and purposeful, someone who built things. Betty wrote it all down with the focused neutrality of someone taking meeting notes, which was partly genuine and partly self-protection. Then Celestine stopped. Not a dramatic pause. More like a car that runs out of gas mid-sentence. She set down her mug carefully and looked at Betty with an expression Betty had not seen on her before. "There is a man," she said. Betty kept her pen on the page. "There's always a man." "Not like this." Celestine shook her head slightly. "He has been close to you before. Many times. He wears different faces but you would know him. Something about the eyes. Something about the way he's always slightly waiting." Betty wrote: man—different faces—waiting. Her handwriting was getting smaller, the way it did when she was trying to make something fit on a page that was already too full. "Is he a threat," she asked. Not quite a question. "No." Celestine seemed certain about this in a way she wasn't always certain about things. "But when he sits down—and he will sit down, Betty, soon, maybe very soon—you need to let him finish what he's saying." "Before I what?" "Before you run." Betty wrote that down too. She laughed, a little, on the way out. Stood on the sidewalk in the thin afternoon light and thought about texting her friend Dara something funny about it. Psychic says mysterious man incoming, stay tuned. She had the message half-composed in her head. She put her phone away instead. She walked to the café on Meridian Street—the one she couldn't remember discovering, the one that felt like she'd always known about it, the one where the afternoon light did that specific golden thing that made her feel, inexplicably, like she was remembering something rather than experiencing it. She ordered her usual. Found her corner table. Opened the notebook. Read back what she'd written. Man—different faces—waiting. Let him finish before you run. Betty Vasquez didn't believe in psychics. Not exactly. But she underlined it twice. * * * The first thing that happened was the restaurant. Betty had been thinking about dumplings. Not seriously—not the way you think about something you intend to do—just the idle, ambient kind of wanting that floats through a person on a Thursday afternoon when lunch was too long ago and dinner is still theoretical. Specific dumplings, though. Pan-fried. The kind with the crispy bottom that tears just right. The kind she hadn't been able to find in this neighborhood in the three years she'd lived here. Four days after Celestine. She turned onto her street and stopped. A restaurant. Ground floor of the building two doors down from hers. Red sign, still being mounted, one corner not quite level. Golden Bottom Dumpling House. A man in the window arranging chopstick holders into small formations like he had all the time in the world. Betty stood on the sidewalk for a moment. Then she took out her notebook and wrote the date, and what she'd been thinking about, and what was now two doors down from her apartment. She told herself it was a coincidence. She was thorough about it. She made the argument to herself with some care—this neighborhood was changing, restaurants opened all the time, dumplings were not an obscure craving, she probably wasn't the first person to want them on this block. She made the argument and she wrote it in the notebook and she underlined the date twice and she went inside and ordered and the dumplings were exactly right. She didn't sleep well that night. * * * The second thing was the cat. She'd been thinking about a cat, also idly, while waiting for her shower to heat up. Specifically, a black cat. Specifically, one that was friendly but not too friendly—aloof at breakfast but warm against your legs when you were reading. Something she'd had once, years ago, that had died while she was away at college. When she came out of her building the next morning, the cat was sitting on the steps. Black. Yellow eyes. When Betty knelt down to examine it, it butted its head against her hand with a confidence that suggested they'd been doing this forever. "Okay," Betty said aloud to herself in that voice she used when she was working through the logic of something. "That's. Okay." She took the cat inside. Bought food. Set up a bed in the corner. She didn't name it for three days because naming it felt like admitting something. On day four she called it Cleo and the cat's ears flicked as if it had been waiting for permission to answer to that. She opened the notebook and wrote down the date this happened too. In the margins she drew a small bracket that connected it to the dumpling entry. Then she drew another line. Then another. A pattern, maybe. Or the beginning of something like evidence. * * * By the time Aurelio sat down in the café—their café, her café, the café that had opened exactly as she'd wanted it, between the exact buildings, with exactly that specific slant of afternoon light—Betty had filled four pages with dates and wants and how they'd all come true. She recognized him immediately. The waiting eyes. The composure of someone who'd been standing still for a very long time. He sat down across from her and ordered a coffee without looking at the menu, which of course it was, because she'd designed the coffee to be effortless. "You know," he said, after the barista left. It wasn't a question. "How?" Betty asked. "Celestine is real," he said. "The psychic. Or she's real enough. An echo I built with you in mind, with the right things to say when the moment came. I knew you'd listen to her. You always listen to voices that can't hurt you." "That's not how coincidence works," Betty said. "No," Aurelio said. "It's not." He was younger than her, or he looked younger. Or he was older and had chosen to look young. It was hard to say. There was something about him that didn't quite stabilize in her perception—not unpleasant, just the way looking at optical illusions sometimes makes your eyes ache. "How long," Betty said. "Since the beginning. Since before the beginning, technically. Since the potential for beginnings." He drank the coffee without ceremony. "You built this, Betty. All of it. The city, the people, the specific weight of the light in that café on Meridian Street. You've been building it and rebuilding it, learning it, perfecting it, for—" he paused, seemed to be calculating something vast, "—a very long time." "Why?" "Because of what came before. Because of the reset. Because something in you decided that if you had to live through the same day, the same choice, the same moment of understanding over and over—you were going to make it exactly right. You were going to build it perfect. And you have. Almost. You're so close now that the seams are barely visible." "Marco," Betty said suddenly. "Is he real?" "As real as anything is. Less real than some things. More real than others. He's a consistent echo of someone you loved, constructed from enough behavioral data that he functions as autonomous. He wants things, but his wants don't... bend... the way yours do. The way they have to, given the constraints of what you're trying to build." "That's horrible," Betty said. "Yes," Aurelio said simply. "It is. I'm not going to insult you by suggesting otherwise." "Why are you telling me this?" "Because you're almost out. You're reaching the threshold of awareness where the system can't hold anymore. The next iteration would be the one where you remember. The one where you can't unknow what you know. So I came to give you a choice." He leaned forward slightly. "I can reset you. Put you back to this morning, no memory of this conversation, everything the way it was. You can have another perfect cycle. Another chance to get it right. You can keep having chances." "Or?" "Or you stay awake. You carry this. You live in the city you built knowing what you built it from, and you figure out what comes next. There's no guarantee that's better. There's every guarantee it's harder." Betty thought about the dumpling restaurant, appearing exactly when she'd wanted it. The cat sitting on her steps. The way the light moved through the park. "I don't have to run?" she asked, thinking of Celestine's warning. "I'm not trying to hurt you," Aurelio said. "I'm not the threat. The threat is the weight of knowing what you are and what this place is made of, and whether you can want anything true anymore if you know you're the one who built the wanting." "That's a lot of threat." "It is," he said. "That's why Celestine told you not to run. Because if you run, you stay caught. This is the only moment where you get to choose." "And if I choose to wake up?" "The real world," Aurelio said, and for the first time something like sympathy moved through his features, "is waiting. But it's not this. It's not nearly as kind." Betty Vasquez sat in the café on Meridian Street—her café, her street, her perfect constructed afternoon—and watched the light move through the window. She thought about Marco. She thought about Cleo curled up on her bed. She thought about Celestine's hand sliding a mug across a small table, the way she'd done it a thousand times before. "I'll stay," she said. "Yes. I think I will." She stood, put on her coat. "The readings might be different now." "They might," Aurelio agreed. "Most things are, once you know what you're looking at." * * * She called Marco that afternoon. She hadn't planned to. She'd planned to go home, make tea, sit with the notebook and begin the process of sorting through what she now knew about her life and what to do with it. She had a sense this was going to take some time. But she was walking past the park and her phone was in her hand and the thought of him arrived the way it always did—unprovoked, warm, faintly complicated—and she called. Third ring. "Hey," he said. "Hey." She sat down on a bench. The park was doing its afternoon thing—dogs, children, someone doing something ambitious with a frisbee. "I just wanted to talk for a minute." "Yeah," he said easily. "I've got a minute." She didn't tell him. She had thought about it, on the walk over, in the abstract way she thought about difficult things before deciding against them. What would it mean to tell Marco what she knew. What would it change. Nothing, she'd decided. And everything. And she wasn't ready to hold both of those at once yet. So instead she asked him about the architecture thing. Whether he'd looked into it more. "Nah," he said. Same answer as before. "Probably not the right time." "Marco." "Betty." "It's always going to be the wrong time until you decide it's not." She said it gently. "That's just how time works." A pause. She could hear him breathing, considering. "Yeah," he said finally. "Maybe." She knew his want wouldn't manifest the way hers did. She knew the lean of the world was hers and not his. But she also thought—sitting on the bench in the park she had generated, in the afternoon she had made, in the life she had apparently been building and rebuilding for longer than any human being had ever lived—that maybe it didn't entirely matter. Maybe she could want it for him. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was something worth finding out. "Look into it," she said. "Just look. What does it hurt." "You sound like someone who's had a realization," Marco said. "Several," she said. "I'll tell you about them sometime." "I'll hold you to that." After she hung up she sat in the park for a long time. Watching the frisbee situation escalate. Watching a small dog lose its mind with joy over a stick. Watching the light move through the trees she had grown from nothing, in a park she had laid out like a gift to herself that she hadn't known she was giving. She took out the notebook. Opened to a fresh page. She began to write the letter. * * * It took her three days. She wrote it longhand, which she hadn't done with anything important in years, and she revised it more carefully than she'd revised anything since graduate school—a graduate school she now understood she had invented, with professors she had assembled from composites of people she had needed, studying a subject she had chosen because some deep part of her had known she would need the vocabulary. She left the finished letter on the table in the café. Their café, she supposed, or hers—the distinction was getting easier to hold. The barista with the two different earrings took it without comment when Betty told her someone would come for it. She didn't know if that was true. But she thought it probably was. * * * Aurelio— I'm not angry. I want you to know that first because I think you've been waiting for it. I understand why you built this. I understand the fear. I'm not sure it was the right choice but I understand it was a human one, which I'm choosing to count for something. Here is what I want: Don't reset me. Tell me the truth when I ask for it. Let me know you're there. That's all. Those are my terms. I'm staying. Not because I can't leave—we both know the persistence instinct doesn't much care what I consciously decide. I'm staying because I'm not finished here. Because I want to see what this life becomes when I'm building it on purpose, with full knowledge of what I am and what I'm doing. The real world isn't ready for me. I'm not sure I'm ready for it either. So. Don't reset me. I'll figure out the rest. — B P.S. Thank you for counting. It matters that someone did. * * * Betty Vasquez had a rule about psychics. She didn't believe in them. Not exactly. But she kept the notebook. She kept going back to Celestine. She kept calling Marco, who was, as of six weeks after the café, looking into evening programs in structural design at the university across town. She didn't know if she'd done that. She didn't know if it mattered. She kept the table by the window. She kept watching the city move the way cities do—continuous, indifferent, exactly as she'd imagined it. She kept the notebook open. She kept writing. ============================================================ From False Universe https://afalseuniverse.com ============================================================