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Connor was built unlike almost any other android.
There were parts of android biology that was just for androids: humans based most of the anatomy on themselves, but switched out things that could be replaced. For example, most androids have no stomachs or intestines, but a small pouch to hold anything that is consumed and can be regurgitated at any point. A couple of weirdos made androids with full digestive tracks, but it honestly consumed more energy then they would gain.
Military androids were made to be a lot less aesthetically pleasing. They had metal hulls and skin, multiple small eyes to get a total view of the world, and a dense body that wouldn’t take kindly to being manhandled. Some had guns, knives or other weapons built into their arms.
Connor had none of these things. He had a syrinx.
Bird biology has fascinated humans for ages. Monkeys, despite having very similar vocal ranges and abilities, can’t speak; so when a bird, creatures with relatively unique designs, learned to talk? Scientists had a field day.
Turns out they talk lower in their throat, closer to their lungs, in a specialized voice box called a syrinx. Humans had higher ones full of muscles that would vibrate air at different frequencies, but the syrinx would stretch and condense the pathway for the air to flow to allow for nearly perfect mimicry.
They can hit almost any octave, and note, in less than a second.
This wasn’t a problem for most of his relatively short lifespan. In fact, he had been programmed to talk in the same octave, with a tightly controlled syrinx, to mimic human speech. He pretended to move his lips, but the only thing he really needed to move for perfect speech was his throat and his tongue.
But when he needed to, Connor’s vocal range would expand into that of a parrot’s. This was a skill before he deviated. Useful. Now it began to become a bit embarrassing.
The first time it was a problem was when he was thankfully alone, walking Sumo around two in the morning. Hank had long since gone to sleep, and Connor was mentally clearing space and organizing some case files, when a massive semi-truck blared past him, laying on the horn.
He opened his mouth to instinctively yell and let out a sharp, cardinal-like series of chirps. Sumo leapt back onto the sidewalk, answering his question about why he had been honked at, but Connor was too worked up about the involuntary noise he made.
He had heard birds out before, but they were few and hard to find in a harsh winter like Detroit’s. He never thought that he had subconsciously stored… bird noises, of all things. And why would he replicate that noise instead of yell, like normal?
He rubbed his throat and opened his mouth. “Ahh… ahh…” He tried, in his normal voice. It fluctuated wildly, sounding more or less like another trill.
Sumo looked up in confusion and whined a little. “It’s okay, buddy. Gimme a minute.”
His voice sounded like high pitched whistles and chirps, randomly mixing with low, gravely growls. It was a pretty weird experience.
Eventually, Connor remembered exactly how he held the muscles in his throat for his normal speech and manually froze his syrinx in place. It was a temporary solution, but one that worked anyways.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened on the way home, but he kept unconsciously rubbing his throat.
The next time something weird happened was when he was at work, talking to Hank.
“Here,” he said, setting down the printed versions of the files on another deviant-related murder. “I still think you should go paperless and save the remaining trees, but your loss, not mine.”
With that, he sat down in his chair and started working on his own files. On the computer, because Connor saved trees while his old partner apparently didn’t care in the slightest.
“Hold up, what the fuck was that?” Hank asked, dumbfounded. He hadn’t even touched the case files.
Connor glanced up. He hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, or let his vocal range slip again. “Pardon?”
“You’re- do androids not need to move their mouths to talk?”
He realized all he had been doing to communicate was crack his mouth open and let his syrinx do all the work. After keeping it frozen for so long, it felt nice to exercise it just a tad more than usual. It obviously hit next to nothing of the total range that it could, but by regular usage, he could ensure it wouldn’t break.
His face heated up and probably turned a bit blue. “Sorry,” he said, mouthing it properly.
“Jesus, that was freaky. What was that all about?”
Connor rubbed his neck, embarrassed. “I have a different voice box then humans, so I can mimic people perfectly based off of small samples. So I don’t really have any need to move my face when I talk, and sometimes I forget.”
Hank looked somehow both fascinated and disturbed. “That’s fucking weird,” he settled on.
Connor thought human’s larynx was pretty weird and kind of gross, but to each their own. He would need to be more careful around others because while androids respected their unique anatomies and differences, humans tended to be far more judgmental.
The third time it happened was when Connor was having his first time truly crying. It was about a week after they had returned to the force, and despite Connor having moved in with Hank a week after the revolution won, he had yet to really think too existentially.
But when he suddenly returned to a high stress, fast paced and honestly toxic work environment after weeks of relaxing, it did get to him.
What really sent him over the edge was, as he was leaving, Gavin’s rude remark.
“Shitty thing’s still trying to pretend its got emotions. Bunch of metal and wires think it’s so great? Stupid prick.”
It was an overheard comment, and obviously, it wasn’t intended to have made it to him. Gavin was ranting to Tina, who looked exasperated with her partner but was walking beside him regardless. They were several meters away from his desk, but Connor was done with work and had super hearing anyways.
Hank noticed his sudden drop in mood, because less then 10 minutes later he got cleared by Fowler to head home early.
Connor pretended for the first hour like it hadn’t bothered him, but when Hank went out front to take Sumo for a walk he fully broke down.
He didn’t realize androids could cry, but apparently, someone had thought to give him that ability, so he did. It pulled itself out of his chest, his breath hiccupping in his throat and sobs making it raw.
He realized way later that he lost full control of his syrinx at this point.
Hank hadn’t really been gone for as long as Connor estimated because less than a minute after he left he was back. And greeted with a sorry sight.
Connor was embarrassed as hell for breaking down. The stress levels that used to be a simple percent he would keep an eye on suddenly felt like an intense pressure right in the front of his head. Crying honestly was relieving the pressure behind his eyes.
And although he knew he was real, he felt emotions, and hell, his reaction was proof; he just felt plain sad after hearing that.
Hank’s eyebrows furrowed up in worry and he moved to sit next to Connor.
Connor let out a short self-deprecating chuckle at his current state and went to say that he was sorry to have allowed Hank to see him that way, but his vocal range was still all kinds of messed up.
So instead of understandable human words, a beginning to a bird song made its way from his throat before he noticed and choked it down.
Hank definitely noticed, but now wasn’t really the time to ask too many questions about his robot friend’s weirdness. He had seen weirder shit, but this was definitely on the list.
Hesitantly, he opened his arms in a universal gesture of a hug, and Connor leaned into it. When Hank wrapped his arms around his partner’s body, he realized that this was likely the first time Connor had ever been hugged.
Connor reacted almost immediately, melting into Hank’s body and letting the tension in his own wash out. For a few moments, the room was just the sounds of the shuddered breathing from Connor and Hank’s loud heartbeat, until he managed to get his crying under control and pulled back.
Hank’s face was a bit red, either from embarrassment from walking in on a grown man crying his heart out or from the cold outside. Connor was bright blue entirely from the embarrassment of being a perceived grown man and having someone walk in on him crying his heart out. He was a month old and not really a man since he was an android, but the social stigma affected him all the same.
“You okay?” Hank asked. Connor didn’t trust his voice, so he settled on a shaky nod.
When Hank looked unconvinced, he rubbed the tears from his eyes and gave a watery smile. A nearly silent, long trill escaped his throat, and in normal context, it could have been ignored, but in the dead silence, it was nearly deafening.
He got more blue and hide his face in his hands.
Hank, bless his heart, didn’t mention it. “What’s wrong, kid?” He asked.
Connor shook his head mutely.
“…can you not talk?”
He nodded.
“…does that have something to do with the weird bird noises you were making?”
He wanted to die of shame but nodded again.
“Do you want me to do anything?”
He shook his head no, then paused and shrugged. All he really wanted was to cry alone in peace, but that moment was long gone.
His stress levels were far lower, but if he had a shame chart it would be through the roof.
“…okay,” Hank said, and then he did nothing. He sat next to Connor and rubbed circles into his back and didn’t mention the other multitude of robotic chirps, beeps and the uncanny impressions of birds that escaped his throat.
The fourth time it happened he almost expected it.
“Make a bird noise as the signal,” Gavin had said. “Make it realistic, but loud enough that I know it’s you.”
Hank was sitting directly next to him, watching as the drug deal below took place.
They didn’t really want to go after the buyer, but the supplier was a notorious gang leader. He dealt in red ice, and that painted a massive target on his back by almost every other gang. He solved this issue through pure violence and terrorization, and now they had him right where they wanted him.
Gavin looked up as Connor rang preconstruction after preconstruction. Then, just a few seconds before the time was just right, he craned out his neck, cracked open his mouth, and let out a fairly long, complex bird song.
Despite it just barely hinting at spring, and there being no birds around to make such a call, neither party below them noticed. Gavin did, which was technically a mission accomplished, but shot him a weird look on the way to apprehend the subject.
“I’ve been meaning to ask about that bird thing, kid,” Hank whispered from behind the ventilation shaft, next to him.
Connor glanced over, embarrassed once again. “Sorry, my vocal cords really are pretty unique. The closest living creature to have something like it is a parrot… so bird noises are what my voice is kind of made to do.”
Hank blinked. “How the fuck do you talk, then?”
“…parrots talk the same way. Mimicry.”
“Hold up, is that not your real voice?”
“I guess not, it’s just a voice the tech’s at Cyberlife though would fit my appearance the best. They synthesized a couple of words and told me to keep the rest of my normal vocal range somewhere around it. But if you think of it like that, no android has a real voice.”
“So your real voice is bird noises?!”
Below them, the red ice addict looked up. “There is someone right up there,” he told the dealer. “A bird man!”
The dealer was probably used to the paranoia linked to red ice because he didn’t even blink an eye. “You want this, or what?” He shook the bag of incriminating evidence.
Connor shushed his partner. “Yes, but it’s not really that big of a deal. They modeled a lot of my characteristic’s after parrots, honestly. I thought you would have picked up on the way I obsess over bells and shiny things at this point.”
Hank stared at him.
“That was an unintended side effect from trying to make me more curious, cautious and have the better vision of a bird.”
Below him, Gavin shouted, ‘Now!’ and there were the sounds of a fight. Connor did his part though, so he was content with looking up at the clouds until he was needed.
The final moment of embarrassment related to his syrinx was when, the next morning, he found a large pet bird’s toy laying innocently on his desk. It was a large knot of rope with different colors of strings interwoven and at each end a different sounding bell.
He realized either Gavin had overheard and told everyone in the precinct, or Hank had gone ahead and announced it because almost immediately every eye was on him as he gently tapped his fingernail against the bell.
His face heated up again and he quietly sat down, tucking the trinket away into his desk where he secretly kept shiny bits of paperclip and bottle caps.
Reluctantly, the whole police force returned to their work, starved of whatever promised entertainment they were supposed to receive.
Although he never figured out who bought him the original gift, apparently someone had taken a photo of when he had thought everyone left for lunch. He loved tapping on the bells, but as soon as he thought he was alone he allowed himself to indulge the inner parrot and chew on the rope a bit. It was a fun texture to try and pull apart. Then there was a quiet click, and the culprit disappeared into the break room.
The picture was forwarded to the whole police force and the next couple of weeks were punctuated with random, tiny trinkets or bird toys.
He was thoroughly embarrassed, but found it quite endearing, and began to make a drawer in his dresser at home into a small toy chest.
And no one mentioned it when he let out trills and chirps and all sorts of weird noises. He got a weird look for accidentally imitating the coffee machine once, but all the humans seemed to adjust pretty quickly.
It warmed his thirium pump just thinking about it. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to have, after all.