As she needs money to fund the journey, she signs up with Kuiper Enterprises for a job on the decrepit cargo ship Kassandra, heading for an eight-year flight to unmanned Station #42 and back.

The crew consists of five members: Captain Lacroix (Pierre Semmler), Lindbergh (Regula Grauwiller), Yoshida (Yangzom Brauen), Prokoff (Claude-Oliver Rudolph), and Vespucci (Michael Finger).

Crew members spend most of the fully automated flight in deep cryosleep while one person stays awake in 8½ month shifts to monitor the ship.

Due to the current terrorist threat from the radical Neo-Luddite group Maschinenstürmer ("Machine Strikers"), there is also an additional security guard aboard: Samuel Decker (Martin Rapold).

Later, Portmann sends an account of her finding to her sister on Rhea, and receives a reply in 20 minutes, rather than the usual matter of years.

It eventually emerges that Rhea is actually a virtual reality simulation designed to keep the remaining humans hopeful about their future; the people in the cargo hold are going to be wired into a large mainframe, which is the ship's true destination.