It was a long and tender kiss, full of love and the right amount of restrained passion to make it truthful. That kiss was exactly as Valentia had imagined it to be, coming from Max. Then he was indeed telling the truth earlier, she thought. Nothing of what had happened had remained in his mind and he had not been himself during that moment: he had definitely not been himself. Be it a split personnality or some mind control of some sort, if that was even possible anyhow. But that did not matter anymore, as long as he had come back to the real Max, the young boy she knew. Her friend. Her boyfriend.

Valentia had now relaxed. No more questions were harassing her. She stopped asking herself questions as she now enjoyed this endless kiss. She opened her eyes for a few seconds to gaze at Max’s face. She had never seen it from such a close point of view. He was keeping his eyelids closed but she could see his eyes moving underneath. She stared for a moment hoping he would open his eyes. But it did not happen… She then turned her look towards the young boy’s seemingly perfect short brown hair. He had the exact kind of hair that was displayed daily in all hair care related advertisings. Valentia let her look slip on the fine lines of Max’s eyebrow arch, slowly falling toward his nose, a lovely and flirtatious nose, in harmony with the rest of his face. This was all she could see from where she was looking. She closed back her eyes and let her thoughts travel between her mouth and the boy’s.

After this long kiss, Max moved back his head before laying it down on Valentia’s shoulder. The young girl then leaned hers on top of her partner’s and placed her opposite hand on his cheek. They remained this way for a few moments, enjoying the close contact they had both wanted for so long. Then, after a gentle kiss in Valentia’s neck, Max made her get up on the bed, on which she lied down. Max ordered the low light to turn off as Valentia and he were now side by side on the bed, the boy’s arm around his partner’s neck. The young girl came closer to her boyfriend and laid her head on his chest.

They kissed again many times as they could not fall asleep, but they did not speak much, trying to save the moment in memories of pure and untarnished emotion. After a few hours, they decided to finally watch the content of the disk they had stolen in the archive centre.

The disk, as Valentia explained, was supposed to contain the most renowned press conference of all time, at least for those who had ever heard about it. Strangely enough, no word of what had been said there ever came public; no newspaper or magazine ever published a single article about it. It was like the government had censored everything related to that conference. Even the attendees were reduced to silence: none of them ever escaped, or at least not under their real name and identity. One man had been found a few years later, but then mysteriously vanished before he could reveal what he knew. His body was found in pieces after he had thrown himself onto the interplanetary transfer train.

Valentia and Max were on the verge of finding out what more than five centuries of researchers had secretly hoped to discover. The girl inserted the disk into an old reader and they waited. As lights were off, it was completely dark in Max’s room. A white text finally displayed in front of them:

Archive document number 2256-789-665-802

Please unlock the disk