STARGATE UNIVERSE: Air Read Online Free Page A

solved it.”
    “ You did not. ” Josh was adamant.
    Pausing to take another sip, Eli cracked his knuckles and put his hand back on the mouse. “Shut up and watch this.” He knew Josh was peeking in on his feed from the Prometheus game server, and that was fine. He wanted a witness to his stunning victory. Eli tapped the controls and on the screen, his avatar pressed home the final glowing symbols. “Yeah. That’s it. Take that!”
    What he expected next was some fully-rendered, high-spec CGI cut-scene of ELIsDaMan smiting the Space Mongols and winning ultimate power. Instead, the on-screen view flickered and jerked, then reset, placing his character on a mountaintop that was many, many virtual miles from the Queen and her temple.
    “What the hell…?” He blinked, waiting for an error message pop-up, but nothing appeared. He’d simply been bounced right back to the start of the instance that had led him to the temple. Reset, just like that; and with it, months of careful gameplay wasted.
    “ What happened? ”
    “Nothing.” Eli rested the urge to curse. “Nothing happened. I’m back at the beginning of the level…”
    Josh made a negative noise. “ You are so full of yourself. Guess you’re not so smart after all, huh? ” He broke up into sniffy giggles.
    Eli ignored him, shaking his head, annoyed at the arbitrary unfairness of the game’s glitch. “It worked,” he insisted. “The firing code locked in.”
    “ Whatever. Look, I’m going to gear up with ChezeGod and the other guys for a raid on the Mecha-Centaurs, you wanna come with? ”
    “No.” In disgust, Eli pulled off the headset and glared at his virtual self on the screen, as if it were the fault of Elite Lord Captain ELIsDaMan that the game had suffered some kind of brain-fart. “That was extremely unsatisfying.”
    For a second, he thought about bringing up his router dashboard, maybe checking the settings to make sure there hadn’t been some weird lag between his PC and the Prometheus game servers, but then his fatigue caught up with him and Eli realized that his eyes felt like sand and he hadn’t taken a pee in over ninety minutes. All those sodas had to go somewhere.
    Thoroughly irritated, Eli vowed that tomorrow morning would be spent posting a stinging rebuke on the Prometheus message boards about the glitchy puzzle, and he padded away to the bathroom, composing his retort in his mind, already thinking about sleep.
    Because of this, he was out of the room when the lights on his wireless modem began flashing furiously, as his anti-virus and firewall programs were swiftly and effortlessly penetrated.
     
    He awoke from dreams about cute girls with blue skin, to the sound of his name being shouted in that particular tone that only female parents are capable of making. The Mom-Sound .
    “Eli!” The door banged open and Marion Wallace, late like she always was, waded in through the debris of her son’s slacker lifestyle, fixing a ‘Hi! How Can I Help?’ badge to the top of the blouse they made her wear at Bobbi’s Fine Dine.
    Eli’s awareness rose slightly from his sleep-addled state, but not enough to form a cogent reply. He lay face down amid the snarl of sheets, sprawled and unkempt.
    “You didn’t even set your alarm…” she continued, then raised the gain on her shout an octave higher. “ Eli !”
    That was enough to shock him fully awake, and he blinked back to something approaching alertness. “What?” he managed.
    Marion was now in the process of smoothing down her outfit, simultaneously fixing her son with an acid glare. “I don’t have time for this. I thought you had a job interview today?”
    “They cancelled,” offered Eli, his words muffled by a faceful of pillow. “I was up all night.”
    Neither explanation was satisfactory. Marion glared at Eli’s inert computer, which occupied one corner of his room with so much hardware and strewn cables, it resembled a freeze-frame of an explosion in an electronics