The term “pyramid society” refers to a civilization consisting of a strong ruler at its apex supported by successively weaker and larger groups, from a council of advisors near the top to a vast and diverse body of farmers and laborers at the bottom.  A city like Tetropolis, which was pyramid-shaped not only socially but structurally, only served to drive the point home.  Actually, lacking a central figure and being governed by a council with rotating leadership, Tetropolis more resembled a well-worn and weathered pyramid, the sharp point at the apex having grown dull since its citizens decided that sharp things could be dangerous.  However, the physical layout of the city was almost a perfect map of the social status of its inhabitants.  The very influential had penthouses and top-floor offices, and the lowest-class jobs existed at the base, maintaining the equipment and systems that kept Tetropolis running.  A few jobs even operated beneath the city, like the farmers that tended their floating fields of atmospheric kelp and the hunters that went searching for edible wildlife in their personal gascraft trawlers.
In her search for gainful employment, Eve looked from the top of the pyramid to the bottom.  At the top, the secretaries and assistants to the city’s elite were comfortable and entrenched in their positions and were not interested in relinquishing them in favor of a nice young robot just starting out.  At the bottom, the hunters and kelpers took one look at her and decided that she wasn’t sturdy enough to brave the haze.  So she made her way to the mid-level areas, home of the middle class, the urban bustle, and the ever-present service industry.
In every population of people, you have a few oddballs who insist on making do for themselves.  The rest of them are the reason that there will always be positions available in service, taking care of those who just want someone else to take care of things, and in a place like Tetropolis, there are many, many different things to be done that someone else can be hired to do.  There are cleaners to keep rubbish from building up on the public walkways.  There are desk clerks at the transit stations to provide information to anyone without a clearly established routine.  And anything that a person might want provided for them can be acquired by a trained professional in that field.  Eve had looked into becoming a provider of clothing and a provider of education, but neither had appealed.  She had considered becoming a provider of attention, someone who, for a fee, will spend time with a client and make them feel better about themselves.  They can also provide stress relief, a decent workout, and, to put it delicately, personal release, often involving a certain expenditure of bodily fluids.  The concept of a professional pleasure-giver is one of those things that inevitably turns up in any human society, like duct tape and the personal injury lawsuit.  Some cultures have referred to these people as prostitutes, courtesans, and other less complimentary names, but the official term in Tetropolis is “holistic therapist.”  It inspires in people the idea that everyone is allowed to feel good about what they do from time to time.
Eventually, Eve decided to become a provider of food.  She got a job as a waitress at a restaurant near the park.  Not too nice a restaurant; those were usually within the tallest of office buildings to be near their clientele.  Eve had been to a few of those, and they were stifling in their propriety.  She preferred the more relaxed atmosphere of the park neighborhood, populated by people who just wanted to go out on a nice day and fully intended to enjoy themselves.  The restaurant saw businessmen in suits having a working lunch right next to college kids enjoying a relaxing mid-week meal out.  She wanted to see as many different people as possible, and the lively restaurant by the park seemed the perfect place to do it.  
Like most restaurants in Tetropolis, this one was mostly staffed by robots.  Robots are built to do steady, repetitive work that requires a good memory, and perhaps no job fits these requirements more than restaurant wait staff.  Eve had seen that the restaurant had a position available and showed them her card.  The manager, himself a human, had been a little startled when he saw how much debt she still had to work off.  Most robots that applied for a job like this had at least half of their debt gone.  Eve not only had her entire debt waiting to be paid off, but she also had several lines of it on her card.  Most robots only had one.
Oh well, the manager had thought.  Maybe she had been a little extravagant in her spending, or maybe she had crossed the Cabinet somehow and they had given her an extra line or two.  (He would have been surprised to learn how very nearly right he was on both counts.)  But that didn’t make a lot of sense, since according to the card she was still pretty recent off the line.  On the other hand, she would still have had a lot of factory-fresh ideas in her, so she would be quick to train, and in any case, she would certainly be a steady employee.  She might still be gainfully employed here when he left, the manager thought.  The manager swiped her card to enter her information into his database and told her when to show up for orientation.
That had been a few days ago.  As the manager had expected, Eve learned the job quickly.  All you had to do was smile, remember who had ordered what, and check back every once in a while to refill water glasses and such.  It also paid off to remember the names and faces of people that showed up regularly, in order to ensure that they continued to do so.  
Eve was gaining a very rapid education in the ways of people.  The restaurant was full of conversations and merriment, and Eve took in as much of it as she could.  She was learning how people talked.  It wasn’t really that much like what she had expected.  The simulations had placed a lot of emphasis on dialogue and language acquisition, as well as a basic primer in tones of voice.  Real people, she had found, communicated almost as much with gestures and looks as with words.  Sometimes, they even used words to mean the exact opposite of what they really meant, and the idea still got across somehow.  She was utterly fascinated by the principles of innuendo, for example.  It was like a form of verbal shorthand where any word could be used to represent nearly any other word.  Communication was clearly much more sophisticated than she thought.  
She walked out onto the sidewalk after her shift was over and headed towards the transit station to catch a ride home.  It was just before the dinner rush and most businesses were closing, so there were plenty of extra cars running to handle the load.  She made her way to the platform by the park and waited for the next car.  A woman with an infant in a stroller was waiting next to her.  
The next car wasn’t long in coming.  It stopped with its door right in front of Eve.  The first passenger off the car was a man pushing a wheeled cart loaded with glassware.  Next to him was a large man with a bag over his shoulder.  He stepped onto the platform and turned sharply away toward the exit, and his bag crashed into the cart.  The top box tipped over and fell toward the stroller, sending a shower of broken glass at the woman’s baby.
Eve jumped between the cart and the stroller and quickly laid herself over the baby’s seat, shielding him from the broken glass.  She felt a few tiny pieces stick into her back, but they meant nothing to her.  Her only concern was the safety of the child.
The man with the cart was frantically trying to pick up the broken pieces.  The man with the bag was very apologetic and offered to follow the other man to wherever he was going to explain what had happened.  The woman was inspecting her child.  Fortunately, not a single piece of glass had reached him.  
The baby looked up at Eve with a confused look on his face.  Eve had never seen a baby up close before.  It was a deeply pleasing sensation.  She continued to look at him until two maintenance robots appeared at the platform to take care of the mess.  When she finally got on the transit car, she was still thinking about the look on the baby’s face.
She wasn’t paying any attention to all the people on the platform who were congratulating her for saving the baby, or to the two maintenance robots who were staring at her, confused as anything by what their subdermal scanners were telling them about her.
As the car slid away towards the next platform, the Security troubleshooter was sitting in the park on the lake shore.  It was really nothing more than a public swimming pool, but it did feature a beach at one end with nearly authentic sand, manufactured from raw silicates that had been mined on one of several orbital mining colonies.  
The troubleshooter had a far corner of the beach all to itself.  It sat cross-legged in the sand, surrounded by a network of furrows and grooves in perfectly straight lines and concentric rings.  Occasionally, it would spot a bit of paper or other debris drifting down, and it would drag a new set of rings in the sand.  The piece of what anyone else might call garbage would gently land in the center ring every time.
It had heard the ruckus on the platform, and it paid particular notice to the commotion afterward.  Somewhere in the margins of its mind, it had felt deep satisfaction at the execution of yet another successful operation.
The target had chosen an unlikely solution to the encounter.  She could have stepped backward out of the way.  She could have caught the box, possibly preventing any damage to the contents.  But she had chosen to protect the child.  How interesting.
The troubleshooter had also gotten a look at her on her way from the restaurant to the platform, and it had noticed the same thing that had caused the maintenance robots to stop in their tracks.  As a robot, it was capable of seeing under the skin of robots and people.  This was the easiest way to tell the difference between the two.  
It had seen what lay beneath Eve’s skin.
How very interesting indeed.

* * *

Mrs. Whitley set out a bowl of dried fruit and put on some calming music in preparation for the meeting.  She also set a soft cushion at one of the places and pulled out the chair at that end of the table.  Raymond was one of five members of a sort of Neighborhood Watch committee that oversaw things at Crownstone.  They made sure that everything was well maintained and organized social functions for the other residents.  All of them but one were robots, like the majority of Crownstone’s inhabitants.
Lucy and Will were the first to arrive.  Will had been a professional stunt double.  He was built to take a lot of abuse and be none the worse for wear.  The studio he worked for had paid for him to get a mimetic implant that enabled him to vaguely resemble the actor he was doubling for, at least at a distance or from behind.  He had been in a lot of action films, and even had a very small fan base.
He was Crownstone’s accountant, in defiance of everyone’s first impressions.
Lucy was a holistic therapist, and to look at her, it was hard to imagine her being anything else.  Every proportion was exactly perfect, every curve was in just the right place.  She wore clothes that looked like they were trying and failing not to accentuate her appearance, which meant that they were doing their job.  She didn’t walk, she flowed.  Of course, most robots moved that way, but the technique looked good on her.
Will set his briefcase down at his place at the table, and he and Lucy settled into their seats.
After about ten minutes, Mrs. Whitley opened the door and let Brian in.  He worked as a diagnostic technician, which basically meant that people called him when they were having technical problems with things.  Occasionally, he would get someone with a real problem, but mostly it was people who couldn’t get some piece of equipment to work because they had left out an innocent little step like “Push the button marked ‘GO.’”  He charged a discounted rate when he did work for Crownstone, as a matter of course.
Brian had originally been in a line of work similar to Lucy’s, but on a much more casual and platonic scale.  He had lived with several old ladies and a few university students, spending time with them and giving them someone to cuddle without actually having to appear to care about them personally.
Put simply, he was a cat.  It wasn’t easy for a manufactured pet to earn a paycheck, but he had managed by leasing himself out to people who were looking for a cat and ensuring that he would not only not require medication or a litterbox, and would thus be cheaper and easier in the long run, but would also provide much better conversation than the average house pet.  Of course, most of his clients inevitably called him Fluffy or Mr. Snuggles or something equally inane, and he developed the typical feline cynicism almost as a defense mechanism.  His technical skill came from frequently being the only one in the house to actually read the directions, coupled with his ability to crawl behind desks and reach those out-of-the-way bits of cable or read a serial number.  As he began doing more and more of this sort of thing, he eventually had a special interface installed in his tail that allowed him to hook himself into most computer-driven devices and diagnose problems at a software level.
He hopped up onto the chair and arranged himself on the cushion on the table.  “Sorry I’m late, Raymond.  Got caught up on a job.”
“Not a problem, Brian,” said Raymond.  “Philip still hasn’t arrived.  Has anyone heard from him lately?”
“I haven’t seen him since the last meeting,” said Will.  “Isn’t he still working on his new project?”
“No, he finished that a few weeks ago,” said Lucy.  “I saw him here the other day, but then he got a call from someone and had to leave.  I haven’t seen him since.”
“When was that?” said Raymond.
“Last Wednesday, I think.”
“Hmm.  Let me give him a call.”  There were a few beeps as Raymond dialed Philip’s telecom number.  
“Security.”
The robots around the table gave a start.  Brian gave Will a look and mouthed a question at him.  Security?
Will just shrugged.
“Yes,” said Raymond, “I’d like to speak to Dr. Philip Abrams, please.”
The voice paused for a moment, and then it remembered some instructions that it had been given.  “Ah, yes.  Dr. Abrams is not receiving calls at the moment.  If you like, I can see to it that he gets your message.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” said Raymond.  “May I ask why he is indisposed?”
“He is currently assisting the Security department.”
“Does his assistance require him to be sequestered?”
“He is assisting the department.  Would you mind telling me your business with Dr. Abrams . . . Raymond?”
“I’m sorry?  What was that?”  Raymond quickly broke the connection.  
“Oh, dear,” said Brian.  “I’ve never heard of Security taking such an interest in anyone before.”
“Will?” said Lucy.  “Philip didn’t happen to tell you anything about this project of his, did he?”

* * *