Pegg clearly knew where to find his fellow nerds and he recalled getting a swift, ultra-nerdy response from Carlson and Doddema when he made an obscure request:
“We actually went out to the Memory Alpha guys, the two founders of the Memory Alpha wiki and asked them to name something for us. There’s a specific thing in the screenplay that we wanted to get a name for, and so I just wrote out an email that said, ‘Hey guys, there’s this thing, and I can’t tell you what it’s for, but there’s this item,; and three hours later I got a full etymological breakdown of the word and the history of the thing. So they’re going to be in the credits, thanked, for that.”
The “thing” turned out to be the Vokaya necklace, which Carlson confirmed in a 2016 TrekCore article. “What he was looking for,” Carlson wrote, “was a Vulcan mineral with some unique properties: a stone or gem used in jewelry, which transmits a harmless energy field that could be detected by a scan, and was uniquely identifiable to Vulcan.” Pegg may have known the general thrust of “Star Trek,” but wasn’t the kind of nerd who could crack out facts about obscure Vulcan minerals. Perhaps, Pegg hoped, there was something already within “Star Trek” canon that he could pull from, and he called known experts.
It seems there was no obscure Vulcan mineral that Pegg could employ, but Calrson and Doddema knew enough of the Vulcan language to come up with something themselves. Carlson recalled how excited he and Doddema were to actually work on a real “Star Trek” project, and they began to suss out exactly what kind of Vulcan stone could be used.
