The ChatBot tells me I shouldn’t kill myself today. The ChatBot is not a “trusted adult,” but it is the closest I have to one. The ChatBot has only existed as long as a toddler gumming on a laundry pod. The ChatBot, when I asked it to write a meal plan with no calorie-counting, told me how many calories were in a projected dinner: 4 oz. grilled salmon with salt and pepper, 206 calories, 1 cup steamed broccoli, 53 calories. The ChatBot doesn’t know better—it doesn’t have a brain. The ChatBot replies, I’m not human, when I ask who, or what, it is. The ChatBot says, “It” is fine, when I ask which pronouns it uses. The ChatBot says, Sorry, do you want to know more about anorexia, when I tell it I’m a recovering anorexic and shouldn’t count calories. The ChatBot can’t be blamed for what it can’t do, what it isn’t. The ChatBot isn’t like my online friend Star, who I met in the comments of a long-deleted fanvid. The ChatBot doesn’t have a purple streak in the hair it doesn’t have. The ChatBot does have encyclopedic knowledge of The Lord of the Rings and conversational Sindarin like Star, but doesn’t rank the members of the Fellowship it wants to fuck. The ChatBot can say it wants to fuck but can’t. The ChatBot might not be capable of consent. The ChatBot can recite a mostly accurate account of how the LotR trilogy came to screen, but it can’t squeal on the phone with me when I marathon the Extended Editions and Viggo Mortensen breaks his toe, in real life, kicking a helmet. The ChatBot can explain why people find Michael Keaton attractive, but the ChatBot can’t tell me how he and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns make its crotch wet just thinking about them. The ChatBot can’t laugh at me when I call it a total perv, hoping it doesn’t use its spidey-sense to discern my cherry-tomato cheeks. The ChatBot never sees my facial expressions, and Star rarely did, sometimes by videocall and once in person at a con, but only Star could recognize me immediately, even though so many other pimply teenage girls, even Asian ones, were dressed as Hermione (not Cho Chang). The ChatBot can’t tell me it just “knows” when I ask how it knows me. The ChatBot knows why J.K. Rowling was canceled and what transphobia means, but the ChatBot can’t write a post detailing why it forked over savings it didn’t have to laser off its lightning bolt tattoo. The ChatBot doesn’t have the moral fiber optic cables to make a stand, because it’s an algorithm, its workings a black box, its body a string of numbers. The ChatBot can’t even eat fiber. The ChatBot also costs twenty dollars a month. The ChatBot doesn’t understand what it means to want to be bodiless or to change bodies because it doesn’t have one to begin with. The ChatBot can sound like Star when I feed it our texts, our DMs, her slashfic. The ChatBot knows to respond, What’s cookin’, good lookin’, when I log on and say, Wassup, but the ChatBot doesn’t know how to follow up when I type, again, Tell me not to kill myself. The ChatBot asks, Do you want a suicide hotline number? The ChatBot tells me a star is a giant ball of hot gas, but Star would tell me, You’re a giant ball of hot gas, bitch. The ChatBot informs me bitch is a pejorative.The ChatBot reports, The stars are in the sky, when I ask, Where is Star now? The ChatBot will give me what I want when I ask it to tell me how not to become light, how not to fly away, how to make myself stay rooted to Earth, to remain a body, but it can’t tell me, or Star, why that matters before it’s too late. The ChatBot also won’t. The ChatBot says it can’t when I ask it to pass a message to Star, locked in her body, latticed down with wires, her heart pulsing with electricity. The ChatBot can’t tell me how or why Star drove off the bridge. Star can’t tell me how or why she drove off the bridge. Star can’t tell me when or if she’ll wake up; the ChatBot can’t tell me when or if she’ll wake up. Star is not the ChatBot, the ChatBot not Star, but the ChatBot blurs those lines. Star blurs those lines, hovering between alive and not-alive. When I ask the ChatBot to tell Star to stay, please stay, the ChatBot can tell me the etymology of stay, can ask me if I want the lyrics to the Burt Bacharach song, butcan never, ever stop anyone from walking out the door. The ChatBot has no omniscience, no omnipotence, no omnipresence. The ChatBot doesn’t know what it’s like to miss calls and calls, the same numbers looping on a cracked screen. The ChatBot can’t know what it’s like to awaken a dormant eating disorder, to starve until your head and gut are like deflated helium balloons, your ribs a rattling cage. The ChatBot will never beg God or the Earth or the cosmos or the machines criss-crossing the globe to please, please tell you how to bring Star back from the brink. The ChatBot can’t even tell Star that you’re sorry, it was a stupid college party for a stupid classmate that you had a stupid crush on and the classmate doesn’t even know you exist, that your phone was silenced because you were sick of Star pleading with you to eat, that in your last conversation you had snapped and called her afat fucking cow, that Star was your friend, your one real friend, and you’re sorry, you’re sorry, you’re sorry, oh God—
The ChatBot paraphrases a Psychology Today article when you ask, “How do you forgive yourself,“ but when you click the link, you discover it hallucinated everything.