Prologue
And suddenly, the auroras stopped...and nothing was the same again.
It was the spring of 1901, after a nightly light show, life seemed to return to normal, for the first few minutes or hours there seemed to be nothing strange in the world, apart from the side effects produced by the auroras.
Damage to electronic devices and the temporary cut in communications was what had generally occurred, yet it was nothing that was catastrophic in itself, everything could be remedied in a couple of days.
The same day that the auroras ceased, governments around the world tried to recover communications, this had happened before due to the effects of certain solar storms, so it was nothing new.
By the end of that day, the first communications should be recovered, that was what everyone thought, the telegraph lines would work again, the distant places would reconnect with each other, the commerce would flood the world again, making progress take us all to a better world.
That's what everyone thought, until suddenly at the end of the day, the first messages were sent.
Nothing... absolute silence was received by those who tried to contact the great powers of the northern hemisphere, the European colonies tried to contact their metropolis in Europe but received no response, the Latin American nations tried to contact their American partner but received no response either, the vassal states of Russia and the Ottoman Empire tried to contact their metropolis in Moscow and Istanbul but received no response.
The first conclusion was that the storm had damaged communications more than they had thought, but by the second day more news was coming in from around the world.
The northern border of Mexico had gone from being a land border to being simply a sea, it had become a peninsula, something similar happened in the Anatolian peninsula where the Bosphorus Strait had ceased to be a strait, the continental part of Europe had disappeared leaving only the Asian part of Istanbul.
In Central Asia the situation was even stranger, the territory west of the Ural River and the Ural Mountains had disappeared and now there was a large body of water, at the same time the territory north of the Caucasus had disappeared causing the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea to merge into a single body of water.
Questions abounded and answers were scarce, there was no answer to what had happened and soon chaos seemed to be spreading and each country had to decide what course to take from now on.
As the days passed, the hope that the lost land would return began to dwindle little by little until they accepted that they had to move on.
The nations of Latin America who had adopted a model of exporting raw materials to Europe and the United States in exchange for manufactured goods must now change their economic model.
Meanwhile in Africa, the European colonies were trying to reform their model of organization because they now had no metropolis to serve, they tried to maintain a provisional government to move forward as independent nations.
Meanwhile in the Middle East and Russia, the Arab separatist movements began to gain strength in the face of an Ottoman Empire disconcerted by what had happened.
Something similar happened in what was left of Russian territory, the recent Siberian regionalism along with other regionalisms in Central America began to gain strength in the face of a provisional Russian government trying to keep the remnants of the empire together.
Meanwhile, in the colonies of Asia and the Pacific, the doubt was similar to that of Africa, whether to remain united or seek an independent path.
For their part, the Qing dynasty and Japan saw an opportunity in the absence of Europeans.
But even with all the political, economic and social changes taking place in the world, one doubt still remained.