Author's Notes and Warnings: Main Character Death (obviously), blizzard of OC's, ten to be exact, corresponding to Spock and McCoy's Inside Out style primary drives (emotions).
I don't know what came over me.
Joy paced just behind the console in headquarters, swishing her uniform miniskirt just a little bit on purpose to distract herself. Sadness turned briefly in her chair at the center of the console. "I need you on vitals, Joy."
Joy glanced at the vital signs displayed on the small device Leonard was holding before his eyes, then leaned over to direct the information into working memory. She and Sadness were the female presenting members of the team, which Joy had always felt gave them a special solidarity, especially when they had to face off against the three guys.
"Stay here while I check on Scotty," Sadness said into the mike. She was tall and rounded, almost shapeless in her rumpled scrubs, the eyes in her bright blue face fixed on the screen that filled the front wall of headquarters.
The doctor's arms helped lift his young patient to a sitting position. Fear sat to Sadness' left, helping Joy keep track of patients' vital signs and making sure the doctor didn't fall down while navigating engineering's floorplan with its oddly placed stairs. Anger and Disgust manned the outermost seats at the panel, currently keeping watch on the big picture, making note of warning klaxons and messages coming in over the ship's comm system. Together the five of them piloted a person named Leonard H. McCoy, physician, from a space that looked uncannily like the bridge of a starship.
"Captain's calling for warp drive in three minutes," Disgust noted. "Or we're all dead."
Anger sat back from the console for a moment to check on Fear. Part of his job was to keep Fear on task when the situation became dangerous. "Fixing the engine is not going to happen," Anger said. "That whole part of engineering is sealed. Radiation leak."
Fear hissed between his teeth, but bent back over the console. Joy crossed to the other side of the console to reassure him. "Jim exaggerates. He just gets caught up in the moment. I'm sure they'll find a way to get the ship moving without fixing whatever that thing is."
Disgust turned half around to roll his eyes at her. "Always full of sunshine, aren't you?"
"I'm Joy. That's my job. Oh look, Spock's here!"
It was instantly apparent what the Vulcan was planning. Joy's assessment of the amount of trouble the ship was in shot upward. Anger leaned across Sadness to shout into the mike. "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?"
Disgust quipped, "More than usual…" out of range of the mike, fortunately.
"No human can survive the amount of radiation in there!" Fear said. His words, too, were picked up by the mike and echoed around Headquarters.
He leaned into Sadness, who gave his arm a squeeze and said, "If he doesn't try, Spock's going to die anyway. And so is Leonard."
Joy gathered the two of them into a tight hug. "It's looked this bad before and they've always managed to figure something out."
"But if they don't." Fear shuddered.
"People don't last forever," Joy reminded them. "We've known that since Leonard was a little boy. We've had a good life. A really amazing life."
On screen, Spock appeared to reconsider his reckless plan. Anger backed away from the console in relief. "Well, that worked surprisingly well."
Joy and Sadness turned their attention back to the injured Scotty. The console abruptly went dark. "What just happened?" Anger demanded of the blank screen.
"Spock lied," Sadness said. Joy turned toward her. The rest of them were still messing with the console, trying to figure out what was going on. They hadn't heard her. Sadness took a few steps away from the rest of them and was standing awkwardly in front of a blank wall to the left of the console.
"Are we dying?" Fear said.
"No," Sadness replied softly, distracted. "Not yet." She walked briskly back over to the console, searched it briefly, then tapped a few buttons. There was a soft thump.
The blank wall to the left of the console abruptly acquired a doorway sized hole. Two personifications poked their pointy eared heads through the hole, one golden, the other blue. Anger turned on them. "Curiosity? Distress? What are you doing here? What the hell is going on?" The top of his head began to smolder. "What makes you think you can just waltz in without…"
"I let them in," Sadness interrupted. "Spock wouldn't have asked if it weren't important."
Curiosity shoved a thick cable through the hole in the wall. "I need to patch Spock's working memory into the doctor's, quickly. We have about five point two minutes to complete transfer." Joy wasted no time trying to figure out what Curiosity was talking about. She grabbed the cable from her counterpart, dragged it across the floor, and stopped. The was no obvious location where one might attach a cable to the system of pneumatic tubes running down from the ceiling and around the perimeter of the room, carrying colored glass spheres of memory. Curiosity stepped through the narrow, ragged edged hole in the wall and hurried over to Joy. He scrambled up the tube system, dragging the cable with him. "I will improvise."
He shouted down to Joy, "Spock will not survive his injuries. He wishes to transfer his katra, the essence of who he is, to the doctor for safekeeping until it can be delivered to Vulcan."
"Understood," Joy said. It was just easier to talk to Spock's personifications using formal language.
Sadness turned back to the console. "Leonard's getting up. The control panel is sluggish. Fear, I could use you over here"
"He's awake already?" Curiosity said. He turned back to the complex junction at the top of the working memory stack, mumbling technical jargon Joy couldn't quite make out.
Distress stepped through the hole, lugging a crate of glowing multicolored memory bubbles. All of Spock's personifications were similar in shape and dress, tall beanpoles with slightly exaggerated eyes and ears in impeccable Starfleet uniforms, their color coding being the easiest way to tell them apart."Core memories," he said.
"Is that all of them?" Joy asked.
"It is all the core memories. Other critical memories are accumulating in headquarters as they arrive from long term."
Joy peeked into the hole. It led to a shimmering, fragile looking tunnel about three meters long. "We'll start a bucket brigade," she said. "Everybody line up." She ran the few steps through the tunnel. The other headquarters still looked intact. Determination was manning Spock's control panel. Caution handed her a crate of memories. She turned to head back into the tunnel and found Anger waiting to take them. The next couple of minutes were spent quickly and efficiently moving tidy, neatly packed crates of memory across the tunnel. "Why this?" Joy asked Caution as he passed her a crate. "I mean the long tunnel. It…doesn't usually look like this when you visit."
"Spock is in the irradiated area, two point seven three meters from McCoy right now. We are sacrificing bandwidth for range."
"I didn't know he could do that!"
Aversion selected another crate. "We did not either for certain. This never would have worked with Jim."
"He's about as telepathic as a brick." Caution handed off another crate and ran back to Aversion to collect the next.
"So is Leonard," Anger grunted under his load of three stacked crates. Showoff.
Distress collected two crates from Anger and passed them to whoever was standing just outside the tunnel in Leonard's headquarters. "As Spock has mentioned to the doctor on at least one occasion, that is not…" Distress began to say to Anger, but stopped mid sentence.
Something was wrong with the lights in Spock's headquarters. From her place at the mouth of the tunnel Joy could see his mindscape beginning to crumble. Islands tumbled into the abyss. The sky beyond the rear bank of windows had turned a strange, absent color, neither orange nor gray nor black. It just wasn't. Joy couldn't look at it for more than a moment without feeling queasy. Spock's viewscreen went dark. "Is he unconscious?" Joy asked.
"No," Determination clarified. "He is blind." He turned toward the personifications working in the tunnel. "I need Distress to come here. For Jim."
Joy shouted down the tunnel to distress, then crept along it to take Distress' place. "Sadness, Curiosity, go with him," she said. She accepted another crate from Anger, turned, and tried to find a place to wedge it among the piles on the floor. Curiosity jumped down from his perch and followed Sadness, sliding past the bucket brigade.
Anger handed her two more crates. She juggled them with difficulty. "Hurry it up," he snapped at her. She set them on the floor and pushed them aside, then turned back for more.
"Long term memory is down," she heard Caution's voice through the tunnel.
Headquarters lurched suddenly. Joy dropped the last two crates she was holding and peered into the tunnel. Spock's headquarters was on fire. Personifications tumbled through the tunnel, knocking her out of their way. Curiosity leaned back into the smoking hole to shout, "Sadness, you have to get Distress out, now! I have to break the link!"
"He won't come!"
Anger dashed into the tunnel. Joy could hear harsh words, then a couple of thumps. Sadness emerged from the tunnel first. Anger followed, one thick arm wrapped around Distress' waist, dragging him. Once in Headquarters, they fell to the floor, sending memory bubbles rolling.
The link broke spontaneously and explosively, throwing Curiosity halfway across the room. The ragged doorway was now nothing more than a gash leading nowhere, through which a hurricane force wind blew. Headquarters shook and tilted, filling the air with flying glass balls. Joy bounced off the back windows and fell into a pile of multicolored memories.
Quiet. Joy counted heads. Anger, holding Distress down, clutching the console with his free arm. Sadness curled up on the floor beside the two of them. Fear and Caution perched atop the console, trying not to further scramble the critical memories scattered knee deep all over headquarters. Disgust shook his head, arms akimbo, as he surveyed the mess.
Curiosity and Aversion were braced up against the hole in the wall, covering it with a torn off chunk of paneling. He addressed Disgust. "We made the best of circumstances which were far less than ideal."
"So much for organizing all of this in advance," Aversion said ruefully. He collapsed into the pile of memories, picked one up and stared briefly into its depths.
Sadness pulled herself up with the edge of the console. "I saw long term memory go down. So much lost forever." Her body slumped again, but at least she managed to keep from bawling in front of their guests.
"Look at how much we saved," Determination said. "And we are all present and accounted for. This is a good, solid transfer. We can organize all these memories while we wait to return to Vulcan."
"Is that where we drop all of you off then?" Joy asked.
Curiosity scurried back up the short term memory conduit. "Help me get Leonard's short term memory hooked back up," he called down to Joy.
Joy reached up to collect the cable as Curiosity passed it down. Determination was looking at both of them, frowning.
"Curiosity, Leonard isn't fully conscious, is he."
"No. He is partially conscious, capable of consent, but he is in something of a fugue state…ah, I see." Curiosity dropped lightly to the floor. "To transfer the katra, it is necessary for the core memories, primary drives, that would be us, and the world line, the moment to moment self, to be located in the host at the moment of death. I had to use Dr. McCoy's full working memory to carry the world line. I had neither the time nor the bandwidth to patch him back in until now. He has not been creating new memories of his own."
Determination cut him off. "So the good doctor doesn't know we are here."
Anger released Distress to raise himself on one elbow. "Fuck."