The building at the center of the city is much bigger than it looks.  It reaches very high in the sky, but few people know just how far below the ground it goes.
Down below the street is where the robots are made.  Some call them other things, like machine people, artificials, or even manufactured citizenry, but robots is what they are.  Robots, from an old word meaning “forced labor.”  This is what they are for, and any attempt to add further meaning to their existence must necessarily build on the foundation of implied servitude.
The largest of these rooms is the main production room, where the simple components are made: legs, arms, skulls, ribs, and other skeletal components.  Also made in this room are the actuators that give motion to the robots and the pumps for circulating coolant.  The sizes vary slightly, so that not every robot is exactly the same size and shape, but they are otherwise identical.
In the next room, the skins are made.  They show slightly more variation than the bones.  They come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.  Some have fur on them, because lots of people like a pet that can provide stimulating conversation while not leaving presents on the carpet.
The next room contains sensors.  Some of them are very small, like the pressure and temperature sensors that are applied to the inside of the skin like spray paint, whereas some are quite large, like the optic sensors in the eyes that can detect the difference between biological and artificial at a glance.  There are also devices available for purchase with the same capability, for those who begrudge the robots their ability to tell the difference when they themselves are unable.  Of course, there are others who feel that such devices are somehow unethical, that a person should treat others equally with no regard to whether they are based on carbon or silicon.  There are at least a few of these people in every civilization.
Ah, the factory machinery is coming to life.  Elsewhere in the building, above the level of the street, a report has been received that a robot has ceased to function, and a new one is about to be assembled.  The central assembly computer, not itself a sentient system, has randomly generated a new member of the synthetic population, and the requisite components are being gathered.  The machine selects a skin and the necessary bones to fill it.  It appears that the new robot is male, approximately two meters tall, perhaps slightly less.  From the bones and actuators, clearly a being meant for heavy lifting.  
Many robots find themselves in that sort of work.  Manual laborers and couriers are almost exclusively artificial, due to their high physical demand.  In any endeavor with primarily physical requirements, robots will be well represented.  Conversely, humans find themselves employed in situations that require creativity, aesthetics, or a keen understanding of human emotion.  Just as a human is unlikely to be found working in a sewage plant, a robot is unlikely to publish a book of poetry.
Now the massive assembly apparatus returns from a highly secure room, carrying with it the final piece of the robot: the higher processing unit, the robot’s consciousness.  In the long, hard journey to create a sentient machine, many people tried and failed to create a computer with a true mind of its own, until a clever engineer named Stelios made a breakthrough in cognitive computing through study of the most sophisticated and complex computer in existence, the human brain.  Dr. Stelios’s realization became known as Stelios’s Law of Sentient Complexity: “If the human brain were simple enough to understand, we would not be intelligent enough to understand it,” with the corollary that no sentient system can ever be intelligent enough to comprehend its own complexity.  This meant that a computer could only have intelligence comparable to a human if it was not precisely known how that computer functioned.  The result of this line of reasoning was a technique whereby robotic processors are grown, not built, through an intricate fractal process.  The growing room is tightly sealed and controlled, and nobody biological or artificial is permitted entry to prevent the growing environment from being disturbed or contaminated.
The higher processing unit is the last component to be brought to the assembly stage.  Now the robot is assembled by a long, snaking mechanical arm that inserts the various pieces into place inside the skin as a ship is assembled within a bottle.  The process takes a matter of minutes, as pieces travel into the skin and are positioned with millimeter precision.  After all the joints are connected, the remaining body cavity is filled with a polymer gel that acts as synthetic viscera to give shape to the body.  This is a robot built for durability, however, so extra time is spent in curing the gel to harden it and provide extra protection to the robot’s vital components.  
After the assembly comes the testing.  The viability of the new robot must be determined.  The assembly stage moves into a controlled chamber, where the processor is activated and the robot perceives its surroundings for the first time.  The first thing it sees is a screen, and lacking knowledge of how impulses from its processor are translated into physical movement, it lies limply and stares.  A set of speakers arrange themselves around the robot’s head.  A small air hose moves into position beneath the nose.  An army of tendrils poise themselves at strategic points around the body.  
Testing consists of a series of simple pyriopsychological evaluations designed to determine the robot’s positive and negative stimuli, beginning with colors and moving through more sophisticated sensations of sight, sound, smell, and touch, until a database is created of the most enjoyable or repulsive things for the individual in question.  All higher processing units respond automatically in certain ways to certain stimuli, and while the states of, for lack of a better word, mind created by these responses are as alien to a human as the sense of pleasure surrounding a new pair of shoes is to an earthworm, the term “emotion” seems to fit them nicely.  The development of a synthetic consciousness capable of feeling emotions was deemed by the early pioneers in the field to be vital in the creation of an artificial being that would not decide, for reasons logically sound in every way, to suffocate its employer or invoke martial law.  Human beings are not logical enough creatures to comprehend all the ways in which a purely logical being can twist the simplest of instructions.  This was the impetus for the establishment of the field of pyriopsychology, the study of the behavior and processes in the synthetic mind.
After testing is complete, the assembly stage carries its freshly minted citizen into a small cubbyhole.  This is where the groundwork of information is laid onto the robot, the data foundation that draws the line between a functioning member of a society and a collection of hardware with a face.  The processing unit’s memory centers are still fresh from the hermetically sealed oven, so the learning process moves fairly quickly.  It’s mostly basic language and motor skills and familiarity with the environment, teaching the robot how to do things like recharge its power cells when it gets sleepy or apply the special lotion when motion becomes difficult.  The learning also uses a series of simulated encounters with people, generated from many hundreds of conversations worth of sociological data, to teach robots the best way to deal with humans and other robots in much the same way that human children are taught how to interact, using the established positive and negative stimuli to reward the robot for correct answers and punish it for wrong ones.  The process teaches robots how to be treated as intelligent and conscious beings, albeit beings who use words as though they haven’t quite learned how they work yet, like a tourist with a phrasebook.
At the end of the process, the robot steps out of the cubbyhole on its own and meets its first human, a technician who gives the robot a set of clothes and a small plastic card.  At the top of the card is the robot’s number.  It’s not for the robot’s own edification; it remembers its own number as a matter of course.  It’s mainly so that others can match the robot to the card, in case it’s lost, usually.  The main purpose of the card lies in the long rectangle across the middle of the card.  This keeps track of the length of the robot’s contract, like those big cardboard thermometers at fundraisers.  The construction of robots is fairly expensive, and to offset the cost, robots are required, in essence, to pay for it themselves.  From the moment they first gain employment, they must remit the bulk of their wages to the government, minus a small percentage for necessary expenses and such.  It is, in very real terms, a debt to society.  The card keeps track of their progress.  When the bar is completely full, the debt is paid, and the robot may do with itself as it wishes as a fully fledged member of society.
The last service performed by the technician is a small one, but being the last, it has gained a certain amount of symbolic value.  After giving the robot what it needs to get by in the world, the technician asks the robot its name.
The robot analyzes its number for potential patterns that can be used to generate its signifier.  It recalls the simulated interactions to which it was subjected, searching for a significant formative event.  Finally, after a second or two of pondering, it gives its answer and is ushered into the world.
The robot’s name is Frank.
* * *
Higher up in the building, but still slightly below street level, Dr. Philip Abrams has a private laboratory.  He works as a design engineer, constantly looking for ways to improve on the various robot designs, and he’s one of the brightest sparks in the department.  As a result, he is allowed to innovate at his own discretion, with whatever budget he can justify, and without any checks on what he can produce, so long as he operates within certain bounds.  
He has never inquired as to the precise nature of those bounds, but he is coming very close to them.
He has been at work for a long time now, working on a new robot design.  He has spent a lot of money, far more than on any previous project, but he told his superiors that the result would be worth the cost.  He had said that he would revolutionize the field.  Now, after so many sleepless nights of work, his odyssey is nearly complete.
His laboratory contains equipment for the construction of robots, similar to the main production rooms down below, but he isn’t using any of it.  No, the equipment he has been using is completely different from the ordinary molders and fabricators.  He designed it all himself.  Nothing like it exists anywhere else.  And the odd thing about it is that it all seems so maddeningly imprecise.  The conventional fabrication apparatus in the corners of his lab is designed for absolute precision manufacture, but the machines he is using seem to be the opposite of precise.  The bulk of the machinery consists of baths of a strangely metallic sludge.  How can anyone build anything that way?  But Dr. Abrams swears by the method.  
At the center of the room is a large bath.  Dr. Abrams is walking around it, checking settings on various pieces of monitoring equipment.  There would be no telling just what he’s monitoring, but he seems to know what he’s about.  
At one end of the room, a small chamber occupies a prominent place.  The labels on the outside imply that Dr. Abrams is growing a processing unit in here, but the other devices and cables attached to the box bears a resemblance to the testing and instruction equipment in the main production facility.  One might be led to believe that Dr. Abrams is attempting to perform the education and testing process on the processing unit before it’s installed.  
As Dr. Abrams paces, the box at the end of the room opens a small hatch.  The processing unit is complete.  With an excited tremor in his hands, Dr. Abrams dons a pair of gloves that reach up over his elbows.  He takes the processing unit and gently lowers it into the bath at the center of the room.  Then, he enters some commands into a terminal attached to the monitoring equipment next to the bath, and with a deep breath, presses a button.  
The strange fluid in the bath begins to churn.  A nearby screen displays status messages about the progress of the operation.  It is at this point that most people would leave the room to get a beverage, but Dr. Abrams is rapt.  No one has ever tried anything like this before, and he wants no part of the procedure to go unobserved.  
The procedure continues for four hours.
When the liquid has stopped churning, Dr. Abrams walks slowly around the bath.  There is no more metallic sheen to the fluid; it has become completely transparent.  The terminal beeps, and the fluid drains from the bath, leaving behind a perfectly formed female figure.  
She slowly sits up and disembarks from the empty bath.  Dr. Abrams offers her clothing, and she puts it on.  She takes the card.  Dr. Abrams asks her the question.
“My name is Eve.”