"The head," she said.

"I believe human facial structure is one of the most important aspects in the determination of whether one person would be a sexual target of another." SUVI held her 'tongue' after that, as if waiting to see if she had passed some sort of test you had set. You nodded and gave a small smile. There were no right answers of course. Things like this came down to personal preferences, and it was a good sign that SUVI was able to start making these kinds of decisions without frying any biocircuits.

"Head it is then," you said, tapping on the map which caused the little head icon to expand then explode into a number of different options in regards to facial structure, eyes, mouth and nose shapes, etcetera. It was very similar to a character customisation screen in a videogame, but here the variables were much greater and the degree to which SUVI could make her self look like an actual human versus having a more 'alien' or 'android-like' appearance was entirely up to her.

While advances in prosthetic materials and robotics designs had made leaps and bounds in recent years, to the point where most body parts could be made to look almost perfectly lifelike, the human face was always going to have a bit of an uncanny valley affect to it the closer to realism a designer tried to get. You knew that it was the lack of true sentience which caused this. A sense of humanity or intelligence which, as of yet had not been achieved by anybody in the field, was always missing.

As you adjusted the inputs as per SUVI's prompting you, the AI sometimes asking how you felt something on the crafted face looked, you got a sense that maybe, someday, the eyes you would look into on one of your creations would eventually contain that vital spark of life. That this dream was indeed possible.

The whole design process took about twenty minutes, probably because you had to be the one to make the adjustments to the screen because SUVI was only allowed to view and comment on the design rather than interact with it directly. This served as a sort of bonding exercise for yourself and SUVI, and she did seem to enjoy working with you on creating her perfect face. You didn't mind how the end result looked either. You sent the model to the 3D fabricator. You could watch the machine work, biocircuitry spindled out and stretched onto an intricate polymer framework, metallic alloys glowing as it was molded, shimmering as it cooled and set, various sensors that resembled human oragans in shape and intention but obviously artificial because of the colours of their material moving into place. In about two hours SUVI's new head came into existence. She had to be turned off for about five minutes while you transferred her Neural Systems off the holding platform into this new interface, but to the AI no time would have passed at all.

Five minutes later, or in an instant depending on the point of view, she blinked at you, squinting slightly under the harsh laboratory lighting but soon adjusting to their glare.