WT: I spent a lot of time pondering this one over, exploring the ideas for Gazelle you proposed when all of the sudden an idea hit me like a ton of bricks that felt so right, I had to go with it.
Basically, my idea is that "Gazelle" Would in fact be a sentient AI that was designed by Clawhauser to help run their whole 'underground shadow organization' that Nick and Judy are inducted into. This version of Gazelle is built to manage their base and operations and help them with missions and scanning and infiltrating surface channels. At first, this version of Gazelle is very...robotic...(Think the dancing app voice from the movie). She lacks Gazelle's general warmness and the smooth butteriness of her tone. However, she was designed by the genius Clawhauser to learn and grow, and as she does she develops a personality, that warm demeanor we all know and love, and develops a penchant for singing while she 'works'.
As she becomes more of a 'mammal' she becomes the 'face' of the underground, creating music videos and propaganda rallying against the corrupt companies and ZPD that have a stranglehold over the innocent citizens' lives. By the time Nick and Judy join they are floored when they discover that Gazelle is a machine, as by that point she's so convincingly mammalian she had the entire ZPD and companies with a vested interest in putting down any counter-narratives marking her as the ring leader of the rebellion.
By this point, Clawhauser has developed a bit of a crush on his own creation, but with Gazelle's own growing personality, independence, and increasing fascination with 'actual flesh and blood' mammals, she finds herself growing increasingly chummy with Finnick, the resident mechanic, implant and bionics expert. This would cause a sort of love triangle thing to crop up, which in turn leads to a mission requiring both Finn and Clawhauser to go completely sideways, and nearly compromise and erase who Gazelle is in the process. After the close shave, Clawhauser elects to stand back and allow Gazelle and Finn to pursue a relationship, and the close call, essentially a near-death experience for Gazelle, pushes Clawhauser to invest heavily in back-ups and safeguards to ensure her consciousness is protected, eventually going so far as to line up a job that gets his claws on a top of the line synth mold, which with a little work between him and Finnick, is able to provide Gazelle with a physical form at last.
So here's "Glitz and Chips' Gazelle, AI turned Synth. The machine with a heart of gold, and a voice to match.
