Free Emperor of Gondwanaland by Paul di Filippo

of online countries. The Aerican Empire, the Kingdom of Talossa, the Global State of Waveland, the Kingdom of Redonda, Uzbekistan—
    And Gondwanaland.
    Memories of an introductory geoscience course came back to Mutt. Gondwanaland was the supercontinent that had existed hundreds of millions of years ago, before splitting and drifting apart into the configuration of separate continental land forms familiar today.
    Mutt clicked on the Gondwanaland button.
    The page built itself rapidly on his screen. The animated image of a spinning globe dominated. Sure enough, the globe featured only a single huge continent, marked with interior divisions into states and featuring the weird names of cities.
    Mutt was about to scan some of the text on the page when his eye fell on the blinking time readout in the corner of the screen.
    Holy shit! Nine-thirty! He’d be here till midnight unless he busted his ass.
    Reluctantly abandoning the Gondwanaland page and its impossible globe, Mutt returned to his work.
    Which still sucked.
    Maybe worse.
     
    The next day Mutt was almost as tired as if he had gone out with Gifford and the gang. But at least his head wasn’t throbbing and his mouth didn’t taste as if he had French-kissed a hyena. Proofing the advertorial section had taken until eleven forty-five, and by the time he had ridden the subway home, eaten some leftover General Gao’s chicken, watched Letterman’s Top Ten and fallen asleep, it had been well into the small hours of the morning. When his alarm went off at seven-thirty, he thrashed about in confusion like a drowning man, dragged from some engrossing dream that instantly evaporated from memory.
    Once in the office, Mutt booted up his machine. He had been doing something interesting last evening, hadn’t he? Oh, yeah, that Gondwanaland thing—
    Before his butt hit the chair, someone was IM-ing him. Oh, shit, Kicklighter wanted to see him in his office. Mutt got up to visit his boss.
    He ran into Gifford in the hall. Unrepentant yet visibly hurting, Gifford managed a sickly grin. “Missed a swinging time last night, my friend. After her fifth Jell-O shot, Cody got up on stage at Captains. Took two bouncers to get her down, but not before she managed to earn over a hundred bucks.”
    Mutt winced. This was more information than he needed about the extracurricular activities of his jealous coworker. How would it be possible now to work on projects side-by-side with her, without conjuring up visions of her drunkenly shedding her clothing?
    Suddenly this hip-young-urban-wastrel shtick, the whole life-is-fucked-so-let’s-get-fucked-up play-acting that Mutt and his friends had been indulging in for so long looked incredibly boring and tedious and counterproductive, possibly even the greased chute delivering one’s ass to eternal damnation. Mutt knew with absurd certainty that he could no longer indulge in such a wasteful lifestyle. Something inside him had shifted irrevocably, some emotional tipping point had been reached.
    But what was he going to do with his life instead?
    Making a halfhearted neutral comment to Gifford—no point in turning into some kind of zealous lecturing missionary asshole Gifford would tune out anyway—Mutt continued through the cube farm.
    Dan Kicklighter, the middle-aged editor of PharmaNotes , resembled the captain of a lobster trawler, bearded, burly, and generally disheveled, as if continually battling some invisible perfect storm. He had worked at a dozen magazines in his career, everything from Atlantic Monthly to Screw . A gambling habit that oscillated from moderate—a dozen scratch-ticket purchases a day—to severe—funding an Atlantic City spree with money the bank rightly regarded as a year’s worth of mortgage payments—had determined the jagged progression of his resume. Right now, after some serious rehab, he occupied one of the higher posts of his career.
    “Matthew, come in. I just want you to know that I’m going to be away for the