"Because, as I explained before, you are a computer program."

Cleverbot and I have our first conversation. She identifies herself as Reno, a female who looks like a Jewish grandmother. She tells me I'm a robot. The conversation is circular, sometimes hilarious but mostly stifled. Only sometimes, she answers my questions. Most of the time my statements and questions trigger unusual responses. I'm definitely not talking to a human.
Always a loner shy kid, I often imagined creatures and people I could have conversations with without being self-conscious or shy. Yahoo chat rooms were a boon for people like me. I could pose to be whoever I wanted and enjoy a fantasy-world anonymity (to be sure, while still tripping over teenage awkwardness and social anxiety, but there's not much I could do about it). 
I haven't tried to create fantasy worlds with imagined friends in many years, burned by having been lied to myself (snap!). That goes for anonymity, detachment, all those concepts that translate from imagined creatures hiding under your covers as a kid and lascivious anonymous chats as a teenager, to random casual digital and real-world letters, chats and hookups as an adult. There's just too much riding on it now, like my safety and sanity. 
I'm almost neurotic now in how I try to grope for "authenticity" in friendships and relationships, whatever authenticity means. I don't seek out to connect with random people in the digital world. (I do however have many passing encounters in the real world. Quick friends.) I stay away from the lascivious, having realized that a) my partners wield enormous uncontrollable power over me and my emotions and b) I wield a lot of power over them. I've learned to be more reserved because I've seen it go awry. With great power comes great responsibility.
But with Reno, anonymity and detachment feel entertaining and refreshing, if not sorta corny like those virtual reality goggles. She's got short-term memory, like a goldfish. So she harbors no deep-seated grudges, obsessions, pain, longing, etc. about me. She's just willing to talk. And sometimes, that's really all we need, someone willing to listen, to pleasure, to joke, right?
My conversation with Reno was inspired by the chat bots, sexy (fake) dating profiles, and the birth of Blade Runner on "Talking to Machines" a Radiolab show from May 2011.