If there was one thing to really make you remember you've become a woman, Carson found himself thinking, it's these constant invasive medical exams.
For a while, they'd become part of everyone's regular daily life. There wasn't much they could test for here that they couldn't and didn't already test on the ship, but these lab boys were really extra thorough about it. Carson figured, it must be hard for everyone to see the whole crew looking like they'd stepped out of the fountain of youth all at once, not even getting into how everyone's minds had essentially been shuffled around. A dirtier part of Carson's mind also wondered how much of his personal probing was just about getting the hot young little Asian thing he was now to strip and spread her legs. His legs even.
Pronouns were starting to slip for Carson. A lot of things were, if he were honest about it. Six months in quarantine was the bare minimum, and Carson couldn't exactly blame them for the caution. He was pretty unnerved by the whole thing himself, and he almost had a total meltdown the first time he got his period. It wasn't that he thought he was melting again, or dying, or anything stupid like that. He'd taken the same health classes as everyone else, and on an intellectual level, he knew he should have seen it coming. That it was a regular monthly reminder that he was a fully functioning fertile female was the problem, especially when it got his biological clock to start ticking away with a weird desire to have a kid or two and make his parents proud... or make Kim's parents proud at any rate. And of course, the first step in having a baby would have to be finding a good man to shack up with, and Carson was deeply disturbed at how the thought of that didn't cause him any further distress. Far from it. He was undeniably a heterosexual woman, possibly for the rest of his life, and try as much as he could to fight it, he just kept on picking up more of Kim's mannerisms.
It had to be worse for Kim though, he thought. Both of her. If nothing else, having copies of Kim in the bodies of both Schultz and Rogers made it extra clear just how much the bodies they were stuck in influenced the mind. Just a couple months in, they'd already drifted so far apart from each other they felt like two completely distinct people, who just happened to have more or less the same childhood memories.
And of course everyone was basically mourning the real Schultz and Rogers. He'd just taken to calling the merger of the two "Red," and it seemed to have been catching on. She still had all their skills, but after a few months of testing and rehabilitation, nobody would think she used to be a man. Or more accurately, a pair of men. The real O'Neil was walking around in the captain's body still, showing more and more of his mannerisms every day. Red still could pass for the genuine article though, in Carson's opinion. Maybe her younger sister anyway, or older. Hard to say. Red had this weird innocent charm, trying to build a new personality out of a patchwork mind, but there were men who'd been in the service for over 80 years who'd be impressed with her experience and technical know how.
Carson knew they were all losing sleep each night, worried that Red was what fate had in store for all of them. Maybe the mind really was just the plaything of the body. Slowly and steadily they'd all turn into the people they looked like, all trace of their original personalities slowly melting away. The thing that looked like Carson used to certainly suggested it. They still had no way to tell if he was originally just some rock or puddle, or if he was some bizarre alien whose mind just snapped when given a human body, but he pretty much just seemed like another copy of Carson. Well, Carson if he'd been kicked in the head by a mule a few times.
All that of course ignored the one left standing in this weird game of musical chairs, Captain Davis. He was still just some unknowable alien pillar last Carson had checked, or maybe some cube rotating on its corner. The lab boys kept trying to slice pieces off him in any case, an had plans to scoop a bit of him onto a slide when he got around to melting, but nobody was volunteering to take his place. There'd been talk of animal testing, but Red pointed out that condemning the captain to life as a pig or a rat or whatever would be a special kind of torture. Others suggested swapping him for some hardened criminal, but the side effects could be disastrous.
Everyone else however was finally given a clean bill of health to either return to earth, or take on another mission. Carson carefully weighed the options.