Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat.
The programmer was known to friends, foes and followers as Ziz. She had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
In one of the most expensive regions of the United States, however, it is difficult to save the world when you can’t make rent. So she bought a boat for $600 and moored it next to a friend’s vessel in a marina. For five years, she used it as an occasional, cramped bunk.
