The conference’s heart was the Lucid Abyss : a 20-foot-tall Faraday cage filled with 23 mismatched workstations. Each station had a drive—spinning rust, SSD, SD card, a Zip disk from 1998—and a single challenge: Recover the file. No cloud. No original schematics. Only O&O’s own tools and your own brain.
> Why simulate suffering?
O&O BlueCon was never advertised. You couldn’t buy a ticket. You received a .pcap file—a packet capture of your own network traffic from the previous year, with a single anomalous ICMP packet containing coordinates and a time.
The lead organizer, a woman known only as “Sparks” (badge: Poltergeist ), stepped out of the booth. Her eyes were tired but sharp.
“Felix,” Sparks warned. “That’s 3 tesla. It’ll erase everything within three feet.”
Sparks removed her Poltergeist badge, set it on the table, and walked out.
“A grief.”