RED PILL, BLUE PILL

After Catherine departed, Fenton relayed to me the memories of his time at MicroTalon. I wrote it all down as they kept flooding back to him.
We can’t corroborate it with the late Vin Vulpen, and his deer co-worker has long since vanished into the anonymity of the Wild, but Ray Flambeau is still around. We called him and Tammy, and it seems that Catherine had just left their lighthouse before heading out to sea (and presumably, to the portal). She’d left a check for the same amount she’d given Fenton, but without an explanation. We professed similar mystification.
Fenton could even recall some of the code he’d written at MicroTalon, that is now somehow keeping our predator/prey society from tearing itself to shreds. Eventually his memory arrived at the moment we rendezvoused with him in Redmond WA on New Year’s Eve. At that point all of the gaps were filled in.
That left the decision squarely in our laps. After going back and forth for the past week, we decided tonight that joining the Group was our destiny. My life, with its bizarre coincidences and events (an accident at sea throwing me as an infant through the portal, as if I’d been aimed at it), seems to have led me to this moment. Fenton supported the decision, and we accessed the URL given to us.
An innocent-looking page asked for a Username and Password, and we followed the instructions given to us by Catherine. Our laptop’s webcam activated, and we found ourselves face to face with a condor. I gasped in surprise; it was one of my instructors at NASA when I went up in the shuttle.
He greeted me warmly and welcomed us to the Group. Our printer sprang to life, and two QR code images appeared. We were to laminate them and carry them with us at all times. Scanning those from any Smartphone would immediately connect us with the Group.
I asked what happened next, and he said they were taking the holidays off and would get back to us in January. Until then their website would display a game for our amusement.
Yep. Angry Birds.