In the years following the Omega Event, normal life resumed.

As humans do, people went back to their jobs and their lives and their regular everyday issues.

Jack, of course, became the most famous person on the planet.

Others might have revelled in such monumental fame, but not Jack.

He declined invitations from presidents and prime ministers, even one from Oprah.

His fame, it could be said, was like that of Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon: he had not accomplished what he’d done to be famous. He’d done it because he had been the right person for the job.

Jack treated his fame in the same way Armstrong had: he largely retreated from public view, spending most of his time at his farm in the Australian desert.

The Australian government, ever thankful for his efforts over the course of twenty years, helped him by providing a no-fly zone over a thousand-square-kilometre-wide space around his property.

Plus conferring on him the nation’s highest military honour.

Plus a lifetime unlimited pension.

But Jack didn’t really care for any of that. He lived in glorious isolation on his farm with Zoe, his aging falcon Horus and his beloved dogs.

He was not seen in public often.

When he was, it caused something of a sensation, like the time he arrived, without warning, at Easter Island, to explore a deep shaft beneath the Vertex there, to retrieve, he said, a Pillar that had fallen into it some years before.

The wisdom etched into it, he said, would be important in the future.

He retrieved the Pillar and then retreated back into obscurity.

Life went on. The world went on.

The Olympic Games were held. Hurricanes hit coastlines. Wildfire seasons came and went. Governments were voted in and out.

Of course, nations squabbled, although every now and then, Jack would be asked to mediate some international dispute somewhere and he would go.

And he would always—always—walk away from those summits with the matter settled and the parties acting as he asked them to.

It was strange. It was as if everyone just wanted to do what he told them.

Lily would complete her medical studies at Stanford and became an accomplished cardiac surgeon based in Los Angeles.

Of course, after all the Omega stuff, she too became well known around the world.

Her fame, however, was more like that of a First Daughter, which meant—sadly—that it was often focused on her looks or hairstyle or what she wore.

For a while, being young, Lily didn’t mind it, but once she had completed her studies and begun working full-time at the hospital, she figured out ways to avoid the cameras and soon the media lost interest in her and found standard celebrities to follow.

Oh, and on the day after she graduated from med school, she married Alby Calvin.