Twenty years later, investigative journalist Ruby Duvall, Phillip's daughter, sets off on an Antarctic tour on the SS Elysium, a pleasure cruise sponsored by the Australian billionaire Sir Stanley Straker (“The Wizard of Oz”). She is going undercover to avoid attention, but it will be a working holiday; she will be writing about the cruise for the Sunday Seeker, and testing her Nanocom dictation machine and a tiny holocamera as she does so. Ruby soon makes new friends on the cruise; a Canadian woman named Barbara teaches her the martial art Pah T’wa, and the ship's entertainers, Diana and Leslie, tell her about the Wizard of Oz cabaret they’ll be staging. However, Ruby finds it difficult to get close to moody artist Michael Brack, who has been hired to sculpt icebergs into caricatures of the ship's passengers using a decommissioned Army laser. Brack is studying Heidegger, and believes that society should work towards becoming more efficient and machine-like. As the cruise proceeds, Ruby also finds him studying a book on cybernetics, and comes to suspect that he's up to something secret in the ship's hold. Diana and Leslie eventually learn Ruby's true identity and blab it about the ship before realising that she wanted to avoid attention, and when Brack realises who she really is he begins to act even more strangely. He seems to go out of his way to avoid her, but when she catches a glimpse of his cocktail napkin she finds that he's been obsessively drawing her face along with blueprints for a large cybernetic machine...