r/EmptyContinents

Just a little portuguese island, right?

Most countries say so. But there's something more to the history of "Ínsua de Santo Isidro".

At the time of the vanishing, the island, and it's 17th century bastion fort, were owned by the "Diver Group", a Portuguese tourism and recreation company. Since 2020, the DiverMinho brand had been developing a recreation center in the island, which included a 4 star hotel in it. And in the summer of 2028, the hotel had finally first opened to the public. There was still work to do in Ínsua, as the only activities that accompanied the hotel at this point were, gyms, pools and an escape room, which was already opened a few years prior. The island still was in development.

But we all know that that development didn't end up happening.

The 7th of June of that same year, roughly around 12 am,18 residents of the hotel, alongside a group of 4 people, leaving after the last escape room session of the day, and the staff on the island (betweeen 15 and 20 people), suddenly found themselves alone in this new world. The group eventually came to be known as "Os Escapistas" ["The Escapists"]. But what happened to Os Escapistas really doesn't matter at the moment. They aren't very relevant to the current status of the island.
We just need to know that the island eventually came under the control of the new Galician government in Arousa.

Following the Iberian Wars, the second Valletta accord set the Portuguese-Spanish border to basically what it was before the vanishing. Passing the island onto Portuguese hands.
During the first decades of recolonization in the country, there had been talks of turning the island into a "pre-vanishing Portugal" museum.

But these plans were all pushed away in the 2170s, when the government of Galicia found itself in need to flee Spain. Spanish efforts to eliminate the Galician identity had been growing, slowly but gradually, with each passing decade. At first, mere refusal of acknowledgement, then, exclusion from all political matters. The former Galician government forced into clandestinity. Then, persecution.

And with no other place to go, they went into exile accross the border into Portugal. Where the old infrastructure of Insua was repurposed into the provisional seat of the Galician government.

The Portuguese Government tried to convince the United Kingdom to take action in Spain to stop the persecution of the Galicians. But with the rise of the Adriatic Axis and the burst of the European war, the last thing the British needed was another front to fight on. Any actual operations in Spain could have easily triggered their entrance into the war. And even as the European war came to an end, the British-Indonesian cold war, and all the conflicts within it, just rose. It was clear that the UK needed to maximize its number of allies. So as long as Spain was on their team, they wouldn't try to mess with them. The UK had much more important matters to attend anyways.

At this point in time, Spain had laid claim to the small Island. While Portugal officially recognized it as the territory of an independent Galician Republic.

Portugal had to take matters into their own hands, and in 2192, armed with a small handful of allies, (Namely, Azores, Madeira and Ireland), an incursion was launched. Officially refered to as "Operation Galaico".

Over the course of three to four years, multiple attacks were launched on spanish military infrastructure. Many politicians who worked against the Galician peoples were captured and imprisoned. And Galician militias started popping up in the northwest of the country. The purpose of the operation was to destabilize the increasingly authoritarian and militarized government.

The operation culminated shortly after the dismantlement of an arms factory on the outskirts of Madrid. With the resignation of Spanish President at the time, Gonzalo Delgado Montero. And following it, his much criticised flight from the country towards Canarias. Where he, alongside his most trusted men, would reside for the remainder of his life.

This act of cowardice left a cluster of military leaders and other politicians to fend for themselves. With no central, organized authority to lead the country, a ceasefire was quick to appear. The biggest members of the remaining authorities were gathered up and brought to Ireland to sign an end to the conflict.

The treaty of Waterford, signed in 2195 served to demilitarize, liberalize and reform the electoral system of Spain.
But more notably, it established the creation of the Autonomous Republic of Galicia inside the country, and reestablished the exiled government in charge of it.

After a few years of reconstruction, the old government finally came back to Arousa in 2202. And with the plans of turning Ínsua into a museum now back into effect, we finally get the current status of the island.

To most members of the UWC the island is just portuguese territory. But to the four members of the Portugaelic bloc during the conflict, the island is recognized as a stateless, internationally owned territory, akin to an IBR, designated as a place of cultural importance for the history of Portugal and Galicia. Spain dropped its claim and currently recognises the island as a Portuguese dependent territory. And to the Galician government itself, Ínsua is officially labeled as Terra Nullius a symbolic act that represents the end of their exile.

But, if you don't care about the complexities or intricacies of Ínsua's status, you may as well say it's just a Portuguese National Park.

The pilothouse of the dispatch boat smelled of diesel exhaust and stagnant marsh water. Outside, the Mississippi River slipped past the crumbling wooden pilings of Pilottown like gray oil, indifferent to the fact that the rest of the world had gone quiet.

Frank stared at the VHF radio. Static hissed through the cabin, a flat, rhythmic white noise that had replaced the chatter of the bar pilots, the deep-draft container ships, and the Coast Guard traffic control out of New Orleans.
The internet had died on their devices at noon on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, their satellite phones were useless. By Thursday, they realized it wasn’t a localized blackout. Southward, where the Southwest Pass emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, the horizon was dead. No wakes, no smoke on the waterline, no AIS blips on the screen. Just an abrupt, unearthly drop-off where the shipping lanes simply ceased to exist.

The world hadn't ended with a bang; it had just been cleanly subtracted.

The screen door banged against the frame, and Sarah stepped inside, shedding her damp rain jacket. She dropped a pair of heavy brass binoculars onto the small galley table. Her boots tracked black delta mud across the linoleum.

"Any traffic?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"Nothing," Frank said, not looking up from the dead terminal. "Not a blip. The river’s still flowing down from the north, but God knows what’s happening upstream. Might as well be dry stone."

Sarah pulled out a metal chair and sat down, rubbing her eyes. The humidity in the room clung to her skin like a hot wet towel. "Well, the generator’s holding on, but the fuel tanks are only half full. We’ve got maybe three weeks before we’re completely in the dark."

"Three weeks if we ration," Frank muttered, leaning back and crossing his arms. "Longer if we stop running the freezers. Not that we need them. Nothing’s coming in to freeze."

That was the cruel joke of it. Pilottown—a speck of land at the very mouth of the Mississippi, accessible only by boat or helicopter—had always lived and died by the throat of global commerce. For generations, the river pilots had lived out here in the bird's-foot delta, boarding incoming freighters to guide them through the shifting mud bars up to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. They were the gatekeepers of the world's supply chain.

And now, the supply chain had vanished into thin air.
"It’s the water," Sarah said quietly, staring out the salt-streaked window at the rising tide lapping against the porch foundations.

"What about it?"

"The saltwater wedge. With no upstream regulation coming down—no locks being managed, no reservoirs being monitored—the river level is dropping, but the tides are pushing harder. The Gulf is creeping up. It’s already past the cisterns at the south end. If we don’t move the intake pumps today, we’re not going to have drinking water by the weekend."

Frank let out a dry, humorless bark of laughter. "Move them where, Sarah? The whole spit of land is sinking three inches a decade even when the world is intact. There’s nowhere high to go. We’re standing on a sandbar held together by nutgrass and stubbornness."

"We can jury-rig a line further north toward Head of the Passes," she insisted, her voice tightening, carrying the sharp edge of panic she’d been holding back for days. "We have to try. We can't just sit here waiting for a rescue ship that’s never going to show up."

"Rescue from where?" Frank turned to face her squarely, his weathered face etched deep with the reality they both refused to fully articulate. "There’s nobody left on the other side of the levees, Sarah. The whole continent inland is an empty room. No state government, no Corps of Engineers, no fuel tankers coming down from Houston. We are the end of the line. The very last people holding onto a pipe that’s no longer connected to anything."

Silence settled over the cabin, heavier than the oppressive humidity. Outside, a lone pelican dove into the brown water, breaking the surface tension of a river that now flowed toward a ghost ocean.

For years, Pilottown had fought a losing battle against the rising seas and the sinking earth—a frontline victim of climate neglect, erosion, and rising tides that everyone on the mainland argued about while doing nothing. They had lived with the daily reality of infrastructure decay, watching their coastline wash away one hurricane season at a time, tethered to a civilization that treated their sinking home as expendable.

And now, the irony was absolute. The civilization that ignored them was gone, but the rising water—the ultimate consequence of the world they used to serve—remained, relentless and arriving on schedule.

Sarah looked down at her mud-caked boots, then slowly raised her eyes to meet Frank’s. The anger drained out of her, leaving behind a grim, fragile resolve.

"All right," she whispered, standing up and grabbing her wrench from the counter. "Let's go move the pumps before the tide covers the valves. Even if there's nowhere left to sail to, we might as well stay hydrated while we figure out what comes next."

The road to equal rights is perilous and not easy to walk alone...

Write a short story or infoblurb in the world of Empty Continents with the prompt: CITIZENSHIP. Whether its ostracized outsiders wanting a vote in the chamber or migrants working on getting a visa, there are many ways to tell this story!

~~~

Submissions will be accepted until Sat, August 23th when a new prompt will be released!

The wind at CFS Alert didn’t howl; it scraped, a rhythmic, metallic rasp against the corrugated steel of Polaris Hall. It was June 2028, and the radio array—designed to sweep the frequencies of superpowers across the globe—was picking up a strange, fractured picture of a world where the earth itself had been edited out.

Liam sat in the mess hall, staring at a lukewarm cup of coffee. Across from him, Chloe was methodically adjusting the receiver log. For forty-eight hours, the continental frequencies—Ottawa, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Paris—had been a flatline. Pure, uninterrupted carrier wave with no voice behind them.

"The mainland grids are gone, Liam," Chloe said, her voice tight, eyes bloodshot from staring at the waterfall display. "North America, Eurasia, Africa, South America... they just dropped off the spectrum. The landmasses evaporated overnight."

"What about the islands?" Liam asked, leaning forward, his heart hammering against his ribs. "What's left on the wire?"
Chloe tapped a cluster of blinking indicators on the console, routing the surviving feeds through the encrypted military speakers. "Only the islands, Liam. The UK is broadcasting emergency parliament sessions from London, desperately trying to coordinate with Ireland. Iceland is online, screaming into the ether because their transatlantic cables now terminate at sheer walls of water.

Liam exhaled slowly, rubbing his eyes. The geopolitical issues that had dominated their briefings just weeks ago—border disputes, massive continental trade deficits, superpowers fighting over mainland resources and vast territorial expanses—felt like cruel, distant fairy tales.
"We spent billions keeping this station staffed," Liam muttered, "arguing over who owned continental shelves and massive land borders."

"And now those borders are just open ocean trenches," Chloe said, standing up to walk over to the monitor. She pointed at a high-frequency naval channel routing through a relay from a British warship operating out of the North Sea. "Listen to this. It's a broadcast from a surviving detachment in the UK. They're operational, but they're staring west across a newly widened Atlantic where a continent used to be. Every major industrial powerhouse, every massive agricultural breadbasket on the mainlands—gone. The only people left are the ones who happened to live on isolated rocks."

She turned to look at him, her expression hollow. "We're a Canadian Forces station, Liam. But Ottawa is a blank space in the middle of a vast, empty sea. The country we swore allegiance to doesn't exist anymore."

Liam stood up, walking toward the frost-covered window that looked out over the silent expanse of Ellesmere Island—itself just a fragment of the Arctic archipelago. "So what are the surviving island governments saying? Are they organizing?"

"With what fuel? With what global supply chain?" Chloe shook her head bitterly. "They're realizing that island nations depend entirely on mainland resources to survive. Without the continents to feed them, manufacture for them, or trade with them, the islands are just lifeboats with ticking clocks. They aren't sending rescue north. They're all trying to figure out how to stretch their remaining grain reserves before starvation sets in."

The receiver crackled again—a crisp, distinctly British naval voice cutting through the static, calling out across the polar frequencies to see if any high-Arctic outpost was still breathing.

Inside Polaris Hall, the only answer was the steady, rhythmic hum of the generator, keeping two people awake at the edge of a shrunken planet of orphans.

I think I’ll let you know that I do not support or condone any genocidal regimes or dictatorships depicted in these maps. I expect a fully civil discussion in the comments section.

Basic lore: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3Fv3ij-qiAckwMP0alHxy3Gu9k3cm0h3nqBDI8kP8k/edit?usp=sharing

Masterpost for the series

The generator at the small market stall in downtown São Tomé & Príncipe sputtered, coughed a ring of dark smoke, and died. With it went the last humming refrigerator, the dim fluorescent strip lighting, and the electric fan that had been doing its meager best against the humid equatorial heat.

"Out again," Tino muttered, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead with the back of a calloused hand. He didn’t bother looking at the circuit breaker. Everybody on the island knew the rolling blackouts and water rationing had been tightening their grip for months, a relentless daily friction worsened by broken promises and drained fuel reserves. But today, the lack of electricity wasn't just an inconvenience. It was a blindfold. 

Across the wooden counter, Celia clutched a battery-operated radio, her knuckles white. She kept turning the dial past the static hiss, hunting for a voice—any voice—from Libreville, from Luanda, from anywhere on the mainland just 250 kilometers away.

"Still nothing?" Tino asked quietly.

"Just silence," Celia whispered, her eyes wide as she stared out toward the Gulf of Guinea. "Not a single commercial flight is in the air. Not a single cargo ship answering the VHF. The world across the water... it’s just gone."

We had lived our whole lives on the edge of things. Being from São Tomé and Príncipe meant we were used to feeling small, isolated by the vast Atlantic, and heavily dependent on what cargo ships brought to our ports. When the power cuts hit, we joked that the island was just playing hide-and-seek with the grid. When the prices of imported rice and fuel spiked, we tightened our belts, leaned on our neighbors, and shared what little fish we pulled from the sea. We were resilient because we had to be.

But on June 7, 2028, the rules of our vulnerability completely inverted.

I walked down toward Ana Joaquina beach, where the turquoise waves usually rolled in with the cheerful shouts of children and the rhythm of women washing clothes. Today, the shore felt heavy, choked with an unnatural dread. The horizon, usually dotted with distant oil tankers and the faint amber glow of the Central African coast at night, was a terrifying, unbroken line of empty blue.

My neighbor, Mário, sat on an overturned wooden skiff, staring blankly at the water, his fishing nets tangled beside him.

"Mário," I called out, my voice tight. "Did anyone go out past the bay?"

Mário didn't look up right away. When he finally raised his head, his face was pale, drained of its usual island warmth.

"My brother took the motorboat out at dawn," Mário said, his voice shaking. "He went halfway to Gabon. He said he didn't even need binoculars. He looked through the naked eye and saw nothing like it was never been touched by humans

"Maybe it's a problem in our end," I argued, though my own words tasted like ash. "A malfunction maybe?"

Mário let out a dry, humorless laugh that held no joy. "A malfunction doesn't empty a continent, friend. The mainland is empty. Every city, every village, every highway. Millions of people... vanished into thin air. And we are sitting here on two volcanic rocks, running on our last drums of imported diesel, completely cut loose."

Back at the market, the sun began to dip below the horizon, plunging the capital into a deep, star-lit dark that felt heavier than any normal night. Without city lights, the ocean looked like a black mirror reflecting a void.

Celia lit a single candle, its flame casting long, flickering shadows across the empty shelves of her shop.

"What do we do tomorrow, Tino?" she asked, her voice cracking as she looked at her remaining sacks of rice. "We always worried about the global economy crashing, or climate floods washing away our crops, or the fuel supply running dry. We never planned for an empty earth."

Tino looked past her, through the open doorway, toward the vast, silent expanse of the continent waiting just over the horizon. The island was quiet—too quiet—save for the gentle, mocking lap of the waves against the shore.

"We do what we’ve always done," Tino said, his voice steadying despite the terror gripping his chest. "We survive on what we have. Because for the first time in history, we aren't just a tiny dot on the edge of someone else's map. We are all that is left."

The wind off the open Pacific didn’t carry the smell of progress anymore; it carried salt, rot, and an unnatural, hollow silence.

On Rapa Nui, isolated by thousands of miles of ocean, the islanders had survived the mysterious event of June 7, 2028, that wiped humanity from the continental mainlands. South America—just a ghost across the horizon was suddenly stripped of concrete, cities, and souls, reverting overnight to a primeval wilderness. But the people left stranded on the speck of Easter Island found no comfort in their survival. 

Gathered at the edge of the cliff near Rano Raraku, two elders looked out toward where the continent used to hum with satellite signals, cargo ships, and distant trade. Below them, younger islanders were arguing over the distribution of the last barrels of imported diesel.

"They’re saying a tanker broke away from a Chilean port before it vanished, drifting this way," Koro said, his weathered hand gripping a walking staff as he stared at the horizon. "The youth want to row out, board it, drain every drop. They think it's a golden ticket."

Hina didn't look away from the crashing waves below. "And when the fuel is gone in three months? What then? We’ve traded our future for a few more weeks of idling generators we can't repair."

"They are desperate, Hina. The supply chains didn't just break; the other side of the mirror vanished. Prices for imported grain were already soaring before June, but now? The shelves are bare, and the soil here is exhausted. You can't eat digital currency or historical regret."

Down by the shore, a sharp voice cut through the sound of the surf. A young man named Matias slammed his hand against the hull of an empty fiberglass skiff, shouting at a cluster of neighbors.

"If we don't pillage what's left drifting from the mainland, we starve!" Matias yelled, his face tight with panic. "The global market is dead, the climate here is shifting erratic as hell, and nobody is coming to save us. Every man for himself!"
Hina raised her voice, stepping down the rocky path toward the crowd. "And when you burn through every last drop of the old world's corpse, Matias, what will you plant? What will you drink when the groundwater turns brackish?"

"We'll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here!" Matias snapped back, his eyes wild. "Right now, housing costs are zero because everything’s falling apart, but we live in tents because the old homes are rotting. The system broke long before the continents went blank. We were already drowning in debt and ecological dead-ends—this just ripped the band-aid off!"

Koro stepped forward, his presence silencing the younger man's frantic gestures. He looked around the circle of anxious faces—faces mirroring the modern anxieties of scarcity, hyper-inflation, and climate dread, magnified a thousandfold on a tiny rock in an empty world.

"The ancestors carved the moai until they stripped the island of every last tree, thinking the statues would protect them from their own greed," Koro said quietly, the wind whipping his gray hair. "They thought growth could go on forever on a finite shore. The mainlanders vanished with their sky-scraping towers, but they died of the very same disease long before. Overconsumption. Looking everywhere except at the ground beneath their feet."
Matias crossed his arms, looking down at the dust. "So what do we do? Just sit here and wait to fade out?"

"No," Hina said, stepping beside the elder. "We stop looking backward to a globalized machine that ran on borrowed time. We rebuild local. We fix the soil, we share the catch, and we stop pretending that stealing ghosts from the dead continents will save us."

The ocean breeze blew cold and vast, carrying no answers from the empty world across the water—only the mandate to change, or perish on the rocks.

The hardest part of the first week wasn’t the panic. It was the quiet.

If you’ve ever lived in Puerto Rico, you know the soundtrack of the island: the bass bleeding out of a neighbor’s car, reggaeton echoing off concrete alleys, the hum of five million portable generators rattling in unison because the grid decided to take another nap, and overhead, the constant, invisible white noise of jets crawling between San Juan and Miami.

On June 7, 2028, that background hum simply cut out.

I was at a colmado in Santurce buying a lukewarm Presidente when the lights flickered and died for the last time. It wasn't a normal blackout where you wait for the transformers to blow or check Twitter to see which substation caught fire. Cell service didn't just drop bars; the network icons turned into blank spaces. The Wi-Fi routers blinked once, desperately, and went dark.
By nightfall, the truth started trickling in from ham radios and ship captains who had made it back into San Juan Harbor with wide, terrified eyes. The mainland wasn't just having a blackout.

It was gone.

If you looked out toward the horizon past El Morro, where the flight paths used to glow with a stream of descending red lights, there was nothing. Just a flat, unnerving black line where the sea met a sky stripped of every satellite.

On Day 2, the initial euphoria hit the streets like cheap rum.
In Plaza de Armas, people were laughing, crying, and drinking straight from bottles of Don Q. "The debt is gone!" a guy with a torn Bad Bunny shirt screamed, waving an empty federal student loan statement in the air. "The PROMESA board is gone! Washington doesn't exist anymore! We’re free!"

For about twenty-four hours, everyone felt invincible. The federal stranglehold, the creeping sea-level rise notices, the endless red tape, the shipping laws that forced us to pay double for rice grown two hundred miles away—poof. Erased by whatever cosmic trick had swallowed North America whole and left behind an endless, primeval forest of pine and oak where Miami used to be.

The hangover hit on Day 3.

Reality set in when we checked the inventory at the port. Puerto Rico imports roughly 85% of its food. We are a beautiful, green island, but decades of corporate monoculture and asphalt expansion had paved over our local agriculture. We didn't have a starvation crisis yet, but we were looking down the barrel of one.

Worse still was the ghost of the system we left behind.
By Day 4, the irony settled deep into our bones. The power grid was completely dead—no fuel coming into the ports, no mainland oversight, no emergency federal relief funds flying in on C-130s. Yet, sitting on my phone’s dead screen, I still had an unread push notification from the electric company reminding me that my auto-pay was scheduled for tomorrow.

LUMA had vanished, the corporate landlords had vanished, the crypto-bros who bought up Condado penthouses had vanished into thin air along with their servers. But the infrastructure rot they left behind? That stayed.
I walked down to the bay wall that afternoon, watching the cargo ships bobbing uselessly in the harbor, their digital GPS screens glowing blue and blank. An old fisherman named Don Jose was sitting on an overturned bucket, mending a net with calloused hands, staring out at the empty western horizon.

"Abuelo," I asked, sitting down next to him. "What are we going to do? Everything we needed came from over there."
Don Jose didn't look up from his knots. He just spat into the water, letting out a dry, raspy laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across pavement.

"They spent a hundred years treating us like an afterthought, mijo," the old man said, his eyes scanning the endless, wild expanse of the Atlantic. "Looks like nature finally agreed with them. Now we find out if we know how to feed ourselves."