“We always talk about the heroes who hold the guns. But someone’s got to hold the keyboard, too.”
Ever wondered what it’d be like to live in the Mass Effect universe… but not as a Pathfinder, biotic, or soldier? What if you were just a backend dev with a deep coffee habit and way too much access to mission-critical systems?
Yeah. Me too.
Here’s a story about one.
Lines of Code and Lines of Stars
A Mass Effect: Andromeda short story
Starring: Aidan (who is based on me), backend dev of the Hyperion
The soft blue lighting in Aidan’s quarters faded in like clockwork—precise, sterile, and far too chipper for someone who barely slept. He rolled out of bed, bare feet on cool tile, and made a beeline to the wall-mounted actual coffee maker. He had hacked it three days ago to override the default “nutritional stimulant” presets.
The smell hit before the first sip. Dark roast. Strong. No lies.
SAM’s voice chimed in through the intercom.
“Good morning, Aidan. Would you like me to list today’s tasks or wait until caffeine uptake reaches acceptable human thresholds?”
He took a long sip from his favorite ceramic mug, hand-painted with a cracked Paragon/Renegade logo.
“Speak only if the station’s on fire.”
“Acknowledged.”
One week since cryo. One week since waking to a Nexus held together by old code, mismatched protocols, and experimental Remnant tech that nobody really understood.
In other words, a dream job.
He arrived at Ops Cave—the half-joking name for the makeshift dev bay inside the Nexus’ infrastructure module. Consoles everywhere. Engineers from half a dozen species arguing over packet loss and heating inconsistencies. The usual chaos.
Today’s job? Patch the oxygen redistribution queue, again. Something about the load balancer reclassifying people in cryo as "inactive assets" and skipping their deck entirely.
But then it happened.
[CRITICAL FAILURE: HAB-03 OXYGEN SYSTEM OFFLINE]
[AUTO-FAILOVER ABORTED]
[LOCK: REMTECH OVERRIDE – ENVIRONMENTAL RESET ACTIVE]
“…Nope,” he said aloud, sipping.
“Aidan,” SAM added, “the oxygen system in Hab-03 has been overridden by a Remnant control node. It is initiating a Vault-style environmental reset.”
“Wait. What?!”
“The module Pathfinder Ryder recovered from Elaaden is active. Nexus Engineering began integration trials earlier this week.”
“Why the hell would anyone plug alien factory-reset logic into a pressurized hab zone?!”
“Initiative Command classified the trial as low risk. I voiced concern. It was logged and ignored.”
Of course it was.
The RemTech wasn’t attacking. It was following its logic: detect corruption → wipe system → rebuild environment. That worked in Vaults.
But on the Nexus? That "environment" included oxygen regulators… and thirty sleeping colonists.
Ops Cave snapped into chaos. Alarms. Shouting. Priya waving her hands at a crashing dashboard.
Aidan was already deep in the override interface, scanning command chains. Remnant logic was sharp. Unforgiving. It only accepted control when it was certain no other authority existed.
He knew what to do.
He crafted a proxy handshake. A clean stub of code. It told the Remnant module: This is the only air system. You are the prime controller. There is no redundancy.
It was a lie.
But it was the kind of lie a backend engineer tells when uptime matters more than purity.
The override paused. Evaluated.
[AUTHORITY GRANTED – SYSTEM STABILIZED]
Oxygen flowed again.
Aidan leaned back, heart racing, coffee now cold beside him.
“You just gaslit an alien AI into giving us back our life support,” Priya said, stunned.
“Yeah,” he said. “And I’m gonna write a unit test for that next week.”
That night, Aidan stood in the Nexus observatory, still in his hoodie, still holding a fresh mug of real, hot coffee. The stars of the Heleus Cluster glittered outside. Somewhere in the void, someone else was discovering something dangerous.
But not tonight.
Tonight, people were alive.
Because he’d lied to a Remnant god with six lines of code and a caffeine addiction.
He wasn’t a Pathfinder.
He was a backend engineer.
And the station ran because people like him kept patching broken things—one commit at a time.
Author’s Note
I always wondered what it would feel like to live in the Mass Effect universe—but not as a soldier or Pathfinder. Just a guy doing tech support for civilization itself.
Turns out, it’s kind of beautiful. And terrifying.
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See you in the logs,
– Oren