An Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence (ORTBO) is a form of recreational workplace activity offered by Lumon Industries to their Severed employees. To date, only one ORTBO is known to have taken place, involving the Macrodata Refinement team at Lumon Branch 501 in Kier, PE.
History[]
Branch 501 MDR ORTBO[]
Shortly after Mark Scout underwent his first reintegration session with Reghabi, he and the rest of the Branch 501 MDR team were taken on a weekend-long ORTBO excursion to the Dieter Eagan National Forest; Mark's Outie was notified of the event in advance, as were presumably the other three MDR team members' Outies.
The MDR team's Innies awoke at various locations on and around a frozen lake, dressed in heavy winter clothing and unaware as to how they had arrived there. Irving B. and Mark S. both awoke on the icy surface of the lake, with Mark scaling a nearby cliff and subsequently spotting Irving down on the ice when he reached the top. Helena (masquerading as her Innie persona) joined Irving as he climbed the cliff, while Dylan stumbled out of some bushes at the top once the others had all arrived. It remains unclear as to how the MDR team members each arrived at their initial locations prior to their Innie personas being activated.
Notes and Trivia[]
- The acronym "ORTBO" is an anagram of the word "robot"; many fans have speculated as to the possible significance of this connection.
- The decayed seal carcass discovered by the MDR team while traveling to Woe's Hollow may be a reference to the Montauk Monster, a similarly hard-to-identify animal carcass (generally believed to have been a dead water-degraded raccoon) which washed up on the shores of Rhode Island in 2008; during Irving's dream the following night, he saw a computer screen with an MDR case file labeled "Montauk". The monster shares part of its name with the Montauk Project, an unrelated conspiracy theory revolving around the claims of two individuals who supposedly recovered suppressed memories of their involvement in a clandestine government research project. Montauk is also a hamlet located in New York, and features prominently in the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the plot of which features a memory-manipulation technique used by a company called Lacuna, somewhat paralleling Lumon and its use of Severance.