I know this is unconventional, but I’m going to start by telling you the ending. Or at least, the ending as it stands today. Most of the people involved in this story wind up either dead, maimed, spending months in a mental hospital, languishing in jail, or gone underground. It's a tragedy from almost any angle, especially because, at the outset, most of these people were idealists committed to doing as much good as possible in a world they saw as beset by existential threats. In spite of those aims, or perhaps in pursuit of them, over the course of this story their lives will devolve into senseless violence. And by the time we reach the present, six people will be killed, two others presumed dead by suicide, and at least two in hiding. Countless friends and family members will find themselves bereft. I feel it's only fair to warn you that, in this story, justice and redemption have so far proven hard to come by.

How did so much go so wrong? When did it begin to fall apart? Trying to answer these questions—as I’ve done for the past two years—is not unlike querying a chatbot powered by a large language model. The responses you receive depend on the prompts you compose. Ask the question one way, and you might elicit a set of facts adhering to one reality: The emergence of the world’s first AI-inflected death cult, whose obsessions over the prospect of a machine superintelligence eventually sent them spiraling into destruction. Tweak the prompt, and you may produce an entirely different story: of a charismatic, deranged leader, spreading a carefully engineered mania to followers seeking purpose in life. Try again, and you could get the tale of a vulnerable minority, driven to act at the extremes of their convictions by a society that rejects them.

But just like the outputs produced by our current AI oracles, some of these narratives turn out to be rife with hallucinations: plausible-sounding visions of reality, but fabricated to fill the need for a greater meaning. The trouble, as I went along, was separating the truth from the delirium. I wasn't always sure that I could. To be honest, I'm still not. But here we are, and a story has to start somewhere.

Let's begin on an afternoon in mid-November 2019, under the redwood canopy in Northern California, along a road called Bohemian Highway. It was a Friday, and Sergeant Brian Parks of the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office was on patrol along the Russian River near the town of Guerneville when a call came over his radio. Someone had dialed 911 from Westminster Woods, a wilderness camp and retreat center about 8 miles away. The caller reported that a group of several people had driven up and blocked the camp's entrance and exit with their vehicles. They'd gotten out and begun some kind of demonstration, clad in black robes and masks.

Sonoma sheriffs occasionally encounter protestors at Bohemian Grove, a secretive men's club for powerful elites that also meets in the redwoods near Guerneville, but the county was typically “not a hotbed” for that sort of thing, Parks says. So he thought to himself, “You know what, I'm just going to roll that way,” and steered his car toward Westminster Woods.

The camp was hosting two groups of visitors that day. One was an alumni gathering for a nonprofit called the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). The Bay Area group ran workshops dedicated to “developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity's future,” as they put it. People within and around CFAR, which tended to attract a cohort of young, technically adept seekers, often called themselves simply “the rationalists.” CFAR was itself an outgrowth of another organization, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), devoted to the technical endeavor of creating artificial intelligence that wouldn't destroy the world.

Both CFAR and MIRI were the brainchildren of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the now famous researcher and AI pessimist who had been warning of AI's dangers for decades. In recent years the two organizations had become intertwined with a third group, the philanthropically minded effective altruists. EA, initially focused on maximizing the value in charitable giving, had increasingly taken on MIRI’s views—namely, that the existential risk, or x-risk, posed by “unfriendly” AI trumped all of humanity’s other problems. In the rationalist world, CFAR provided the grand thinking, MIRI the technical know-how, and EA the funding to save humans from being eradicated by runaway machines.

The other group at Westminster Woods that day was a class of 18 elementary school children, attending a ropes course.

As Parks received updates over the radio, it was the presence of kids that upped the stakes for the sheriff’s department. “The information I was receiving kind of started to raise the hairs on the back of my neck a little bit,” he says. “Because it didn't seem consistent with your typical protest.” A new 911 call reported that one of the demonstrators was carrying a gun. “So at that time I'm thinking it’s one of two things,” Parks says. “Is this going to be an active killer? Or is this going to be a hostage standoff?”

Parks upgraded the police call to a “code 3”—a lights and sirens emergency—and requested more units as he sped toward the camp. He and one of his deputies, Joseph Ricks, pulled up to the entrance within moments of each other and found the driveway blocked by a red Prius. Down a short hill, Parks saw three figures in full-length black cloaks, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, pacing and chanting. He unholstered his gun.

This is roughly the point in the story when agreed-upon facts begin to dwindle. In Parks' account, which he relayed to me in the fall of 2023 at a local Starbucks, the protesters were speaking in unison. “Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed,” he said. The group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against CFAR and MIRI. They alleged that MIRI had “paid out blackmail (using donor funds)” to quash sexual misconduct accusations, and that CFAR's leader “discriminates against trans women.” Other allegations were more esoteric. CFAR did not “appreciably develop novel rationality/mental tech.” The path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved “escaping containment by society” through “mental autonomy” and “interhemispheric game theory.”

None of this would have meant much to Parks. He and Ricks ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out demanding a same-gender pat down, like one might request at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless, “they were not going to get that luxury at that point in time,” he told me. “It's like, well, we don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl and we gotta handcuff you.” Parks’ deputies subdued the three in prone positions, what Parks calls “a high-risk-type takedown” requiring more force than “a normal handcuffing style.”

By now, the police had been told there might be five outsiders on the grounds, including one who was possibly carrying a hatchet. Many of the CFAR alumni hadn’t even arrived at the site, having received emails from organizers that they shouldn’t come. The children and their teachers had taken shelter in buildings on the property. As Parks and another deputy moved across a small bridge toward the camp, another robed figure approached them. When Parks yelled for them to put their hands up, he says, the protester—who was also a trans woman—fell onto her back, as if slipping on ice, then struggled briefly with a deputy while being cuffed.

Parks had ordered in the SWAT team, which proceeded to evacuate the children and teachers in an armored vehicle. With the help of a helicopter, the police spent hours searching the 200-acre complex for the fifth, armed protester. In the end, there wasn't one. “We later learned that it was actually a maintenance worker who had armed himself with the hatchet,” Parks says. The original reports of protesters carrying weapons had also been false. One had a can of pepper spray, but none of them had a gun.

The four were transported, handcuffed, to a detention facility in nearby Santa Rosa. Both sides would agree on one final fact: that the protesters refused to cooperate, in any sense. “I know your face!” one said to the officers as they were bundled into the facility. “You are slavers. You are Nazis.”

When the story of the protest broke in the local news the following day, it read at first like a kooky Northern California police blotter tale: robed figures among the redwoods, cops bumbling through the underbrush chasing a phantom accomplice. At the jail, though, the clash between the police and the protesters somehow set in motion a story that would end with one demonstrator dead, one missing, one detained, and one on trial for murder.

The four protestors—Emma Borhanian, Gwen Danielson, Ziz LaSota, and Alex Leatham—had all been involved in various ways with the CFAR, MIRI, and EA communities. But they had refused to give their names to the cops, who eventually used fingerprints to identify them. This meant that in early stories about the arrests, LaSota and Leatham were deadnamed—identified by their birth names rather than their chosen ones.

To the Sheriff's Office this may have seemed a minor oversight, even an unavoidable one. These were, after all, the names the fingerprints had turned up. But it represented the first crack in what would become a rhetorical and factual fissure between the official narrative and that of the protesters. They would be routinely deadnamed in court documents and proceedings, and even by their own attorneys in conversations with me. (In this story, wherever possible, I'm using their given family names, which none officially changed to my knowledge, and their chosen first names and pronouns, as far as I can discern from their own statements and the blogs I've established that they maintained. However, I do at times quote public officials and records that refer to trans people by the pronouns they were assigned at birth.)

To the extent that the group had any coherent collective identity, they would come to be known in the rationalist community as “the Zizians.” To the extent they had a leader, it would be perceived as Ziz LaSota. The members of the group never seemed to adopt this name themselves, nor would they accept its implications: that they were a group at all, that they had a leader. But to the people they’d splintered off from, it appeared that all troubles flowed back to LaSota.

LaSota was a 28-year-old software developer who had grown up in Alaska. By her own description, she was technically gifted from a young age. “My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't seem to be really bothered by the fact that I'm weird,” she wrote in 2014, in the comments of a post on LessWrong.com, the online forum that serves as a discussion hub for rationalist thought. “But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped, and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun.”

LaSota began “reading up on EA and x-risk,” she wrote later, as an undergraduate in computer engineering at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. That’s also when she was “starting to donate to MIRI.” She interned at the software giant Oracle, and at NASA, developing a tool for space weather analysis. But around the time she graduated, she began to wonder if she should commit to graduate school in computer science or pursue a job as a computer engineer and “earn to give”—the effective altruism term for making as much money as possible in order to donate it. (The concept is now most attached to convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, but at the time it was still novel, as the EA movement took off in the Bay Area.)

LaSota writes that she contacted Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR, to ask for advice. According to LaSota’s account, Salamon “said actually I should go to grad school, find a startup co-founder, drop out and earn to give via startups instead.” (Salamon declined to comment for this story.) After attending grad school for a while and then dropping out—without snagging a cofounder—LaSota moved to the Bay Area and worked for a gaming company, then a biological instruments startup.

Disenchanted with what she viewed as the hollowness of startup culture, LaSota increasingly turned to the rationalist community for answers. Since the early 2000s, when Yudkowsky had started gathering like-minded individuals to warn about the dangers of AI, the community had evolved from a largely technical movement to a social one. At workshops, in group houses, and on LessWrong.com, rationalists engaged in extended philosophical debate about AI, game theory, the singularity (in which a superintelligence would arise in one, instantaneous moment), and how to live a more rational life.

Much of their discussion, online and off, was obscure. Partly this was the result of the technical concepts underpinning theories about the future of AI. But the arcane language around “infohazards,” “basilisks,” or “Schelling points” also served a more exclusive purpose. It was a lexicon required for acceptance into a kind of priesthood, a self-declared bulwark against the destruction of humanity itself.

LaSota dove into the debates, sometimes passionately enough to alarm her fellow rationalists—many of whom she increasingly regarded, in at least one respect, as morally repellent. “I'd been a vegan first,” she later wrote, “and my primary concern upon learning about the singularity was how do I make this benefit all sentient life, not just humans. I described my feelings towards flesh-eating monsters, who had created hell on Earth [for] more people than those they had helped.” (In Ziz’s writing, anyone who eats meat is a “flesh-eating monster,” and sentient animals are “people.”)

In 2016, LaSota attended an eight-day CFAR program called the Workshop on AI Safety Strategy. One event included a session of “‘doom circles,’” she later wrote, where each participant “took turns having everyone else bluntly but compassionately say why they were doomed,” and also weighed in themselves. The session elicited difficult soul searching from LaSota about whether she was “morally valuable” and “net positive” to Earth—whether her life would contribute to saving humanity at all. “When it was my turn,” LaSota wrote, “I said my doom was that I could succeed at the things I tried, succeed exceptionally well, like I bet I could in 10 years have earned to give like 10 million dollars through startups, and it would still be too little too late, and ultimately the world would still burn.”

The Zizians came together over the next two years, splintering off one by one from the established rationalist and EA communities. Gwen Danielson, a high-achieving prep school graduate from Washington state who’d studied electrical engineering, math, and cognitive science at Rice University, met LaSota in the mid-2010s. They bonded over their experiences in the soul-sucking Bay Area real estate market, which often shunted rationalist-curious arrivals into toxic group-living situations or debt. “Most of the money donated by earn-to-givers [was] going to landlords,” Danielson wrote. “We both recognized housing as one of the most obvious problems with the Bay area rationalist community.”

In 2016, the pair began living together on a small sailboat Danielson owned, in the Berkeley Marina. LaSota, after learning some sailing basics, bought her own 24’ boat for $600 off Craigslist. She named it the Black Cygnet and began living on it. From there, the pair decided to expand their life at sea and create “a federated fleet of boats” that would provide housing for rationalists, “in order to improve the rate of work on AI safety.” They’d call it the Rationalist Fleet. Danielson, LaSota, and a third comrade purchased a 70-year-old Navy tugboat that had been christened Caleb, and LaSota travelled to Alaska to sail it down, together with acquaintances she’d recruited via online rationalist groups.

Ninety-four feet long and striped with rust, the boat was fraught with problems from the beginning. LaSota and Danielson managed to reach the Bay Area with it, but had trouble finding a cheap place to anchor. They became consumed with the struggle to keep the vessel seaworthy. Marooned for days and weeks onboard, pondering their deteriorating surroundings, they began creating their own unique philosophies. “We’ve been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while,” LaSota wrote to a correspondent at the time, “and in the course developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationality and theories of psychology aimed at solving our problems.”

As LaSota articulated it, their goals had moved beyond real estate, into a more grandiose realm. “We are trying to build a cabal,” she wrote. The aim was “to find abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Gervais-sociopaths, creating a fundamentally different kind of group than I have heard of existing before.” (The Gervais principle, articulated by the writer Venkatesh Rao—based on an extensive but light-hearted analysis of The Office—is a theory that at the top of any organization are “sociopaths” who know how to acquire and manipulate power. Beneath them are the loyal “clueless” and the disaffected “losers.”) Sociopathy, LaSota wrote, would allow the group’s members to operate “unpwned by the external world.”

“Gervais-sociopaths” was a foundational concept in LaSota’s increasingly tangled ideology, the kind that went beyond even the most impenetrable thinking found on LessWrong.com. On her blog, at sinceriously.fyi, she outlined that ideology across 100,000 words over several years, on topics ranging from engineering, to her personal history, to psychological manipulation, to gender theory, to the future motivations of a superior artificial intelligence.

I have read this corpus in its entirety more than once, and attempting to summarize LaSota’s or Zizian thought by quoting from it is an almost impossible exercise. It would be akin to explaining a person’s life by examining remnants of charred photos salvaged from a house consumed by fire. To a reader unstudied in rationalist-inflected thought—and even to many at the time who were—the blog could read like the work of an intelligent but unhinged mind:

Good is at an inherent disadvantage in epistemic drinking contests. But we have an advantage: I am actually willing to die to advance good.

At one point, I saw a married couple, one of them doing AI alignment research, who were planning to have a baby. They agreed that the researcher would also sleep in the room with the crying baby in the middle of the night, not to take any load off the other. Just a signal of some kind. Make things even. And I realized that I was no longer able to stand people.

Liches have trouble thinking clearly about paths through probability space that conflict with their phylactery, and the more conjunctive a mission it is to make true their phylactery, the more bits of epistemics will be corrupted by their refusal to look into that abyss.

However opaque LaSota’s ideology may have seemed to outsiders, there were some in the rationalist community who felt its pull—including her shipmate Danielson, Emma Borhanian, and Alex Leatham. Borhanian was a former Google engineer; Leatham had studied mathematics at UC Berkeley and UCLA. To them, the normies who dismissed Ziz were no different than the friends and family who failed to understand the implications of AI superintelligence.

LaSota and her compatriots, who’d bought into the need for sentient life to be saved from AI, increasingly found MIRI and CFAR insufficiently committed to that mission. “They are obviously not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world,” Danielson wrote. At best, the Bay Area organizations were doing “niche research.” At worst, they were actively corrupt, even abusive. LaSota and those in her orbit alleged that CFAR and its leadership were laced with anti-trans beliefs and practices. (“That's preposterous,” one member of the rationalist community, who is also trans, told me. “Rationalists have the most trans people of any group I've seen that isn't explicitly about being trans. You'd just show up at a math event or house party, and it would be 20 percent trans.”)

Within the labyrinth of LaSota’s writing, even the most perplexed reader could locate the essence of her aspiration: to attain a hero’s role, with a commitment to an unassailable moral code. She yearned for action in support of that code, the kind of action that most humans—and rationalists—lacked the moral fortitude to pursue.

So the group set about trying to “install” new “mental tech,” as they described it, to “jailbreak” their minds from convention. They began wearing all black, identifying their philosophy as “vegan anarchotranshumanism” and their spiritual beliefs as “vegan sith.” (“The Sith do what they want deep down,” LaSota explained. “They remove all obstructions to that.”)

Danielson developed an elaborate psychological theory around brain hemispheres, soon taken up by LaSota. A person’s core consisted of two hemispheres, each one intrinsically good or nongood. In extremely rare cases they could be “double good”—a condition that, it so happened, LaSota identified in herself. A person’s two hemispheres could be at war with each other, but it was possible to gain awareness and even control of them through a process called “debucketing.” LaSota and Danielson began experimenting with something they called “unihemispheric sleep,” which they believed allowed them to put portions of their brain into slow wave sleep while remaining consciously awake. It was, LaSota wrote, “a means of keeping restless watch while alone.”

In their four months on the boat, however, LaSota and Danielson’s theorizing seemed to outpace their seafaring skills. In November 2017, the Coast Guard had to retrieve Caleb after the 345-ton tug dragged its anchor and collided with other boats in the harbor, while carrying hundreds of gallons of oily bilge water. Ultimately the vessel became too expensive to maintain, and the group abandoned it. (In 2022, the operators of Pillar Point Harbor in San Mateo, where Caleb had been left behind, spent more than $50,000 to tow the boat back out to sea. One month later, it sank.) “After Rationalist Fleet I updated away from boats being a good idea for housing,” Danielson wrote, “in favor of well-outfitted stealth RVs.”

For now, the friends seemed scattered and vulnerable, with tenuous housing and social worlds in flux. “I was kind of homeless,” Leatham later wrote of the time. But they were increasingly united around the idea of taking action. “I de-facto lead without authority,” LaSota wrote. “Just like I did a lot of in Rationalist Fleet even though Gwen was the boss formally (and the high level strategic vision as well, actually). Real leaders don’t need authority.”

By the day of the CFAR reunion at Westminster Woods, in November 2019, the schism between the rationalist mothership and LaSota’s small faction had taken a more aggressive turn. The splinter group had suggested they could sue over what they believed to be anti-trans discrimination by CFAR’s leaders, and had become verbally confrontational online and at CFAR meetups.

To the larger rationalist community, their writing seemed increasingly unhinged, even threatening. “Vengeance and justice are in the hands of anyone who wants it,” Leatham wrote. “You dont need to appeal to anyone to take revenge.” Salamon, CFAR’s executive director, later wrote on Facebook that she’d begun to feel “extreme fear” toward LaSota. She recalled that LaSota had posted to Discord that “If MIRI attempts to silence me using governmental force … that would be physical violence. If they escalate to physical violence, we are prepared to perform self-defense.”

There were Byzantine levels to this inter-community drama that defy summary, played out across endless threads on Discord, LessWrong, and Tumblr. As self-described vegan Siths, LaSota and Danielson expressed outrage that MIRI’s efforts to create human-friendly AI didn’t seem to include other animals in the equation.

The group had become especially fixated on a particular rumor, namely that the nonprofit MIRI had potentially used donor money to pay off a former staffer. The ex-employee had launched a website accusing MIRI leaders of statutory rape and a coverup. Though the facts were never litigated in a courtroom, MIRI’s president wrote in 2019 that he had checked “some of the most serious allegations” and “found them to be straightforwardly false.” The website’s owner had agreed to retract the claims and take the site down, the president said, under conditions that were confidential. But what angered LaSota and Danielson was as much the idea—in their minds at least—that the nonprofit had succumbed to blackmail as the allegations themselves. In negotiating, they believed, the organization had violated one of its fundamental principles: “timeless decision theory,” a concept developed by MIRI co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Yudkowsky, who later renamed it “functional decision theory,” declined to comment for this story.)

Without getting mired in the details—which, unfortunately, are extremely difficult to distill without getting into game theory—suffice it to say: Timeless decision theory asserts that, in making a decision, a person should consider not just the outcome of that specific choice but also their own underlying patterns of reasoning—and those of their past and future selves (not least because these patterns might one day be anticipated by an omniscient, adversarial AI). LaSota, in her writing, seems to have interpreted this metaphysical game as a call to operate “timelessly”—to treat one’s choices as if they affected the fate of all sentient life across temporal horizons. Under this line of thinking, one should never back down or surrender, no matter what. In any case, the Zizians believed that timeless decision theorists are supposed to resist blackmail, and they perceived this purported betrayal of principle as deeper than the crime itself.

According to Danielson’s later writing, the group planned a series of talks to communicate all of this at the Westminster Woods reunion. Days before, however, CFAR’s leadership barred Danielson and LaSota from attending. So they arrived instead in their robes and masks, three-page flyers in hand. “MIRICFAR betrayed us,” the flyers read in part. “It is not what it once seemed like it would become. New things can be built.”

Following their arrests, each of the four spent several days in jail before bailing out. Prosecutors charged them with five misdemeanors, for crimes like false imprisonment of the campers, willful cruelty to a child, and wearing a mask for an “unlawful purpose.” They also layered on a felony, for conspiracy, that carried the threat of serious prison time.

But LaSota and the other three, on their blogs and in legal briefs, cast themselves as the victims. In their defense filings, the group argued that they’d traveled to Westminster Woods “to protest the cover up of the sexual abuse of minors” by CFAR. They couldn’t have known that the elementary school children would also be on the property, or that camp staffers would interpret their protest as an active shooter situation. They accused the police of filing false reports, and the county district attorney of “malicious prosecution” on “trumped-up criminal charges.”

“Don't we know by now that the word of a cop isn't worth shit?” Michelle Zajko, another young trans rationalist who traveled in the group’s circles but hadn’t attended the protest, wrote later. The false gun claim and police presence, she wrote, were “a fairly standard example of a phenomenon called ‘swatting’ where someone deceives emergency services into sending police based on false reporting.”

The group hired a lawyer and filed a civil rights complaint against the Sonoma County authorities, on the grounds that they’d been subjected to excessive force, and that their requests for same-gender searches had been ignored. The searches the male officers had conducted, including under their clothing, they alleged, “amounted to sexual assault and battery.” After being brought to the jail, the complaint alleged, the group had their clothing “forcibly stripped off their bodies.” They said the officers then “crowded around to look at the Claimants’ genitals and naked bodies.” They were then “tortured” over a number of days, they said, “woken whenever they started to fall asleep … and were kept naked and cold for days.”

With the arrival of the pandemic, both cases slowed to a crawl, and the group seemed to grow more isolated and inward-looking. Their collective exile from the rationalist community was virtually complete. They were banned from LessWrong.com, along with various CFAR meetups and conferences. An anonymous rationalist launched a site, Zizians.info, branding them “the Zizians” for the first time and warning that the group was a cult. The page, which LaSota called “a rationalist smear site,” alleged that LaSota’s unihemispheric sleep practices had led to the 2018 suicide of a trans woman attached to the group, Maia Pasek. (LaSota wrote that unihemispheric sleep “did not doom Pasek.” But her own description of her interactions with Pasek, titled “Pasek’s Doom” and including lines like “We each went on our journey of jailbreaking into psychopathy fully” and “Pasek’s right hemisphere had been ‘mostly-dead,’” did little to rebut the accusations.)

Whatever thread of attachment they’d felt to the rationalists was snapped by the response to the protests. “‘Rationalists’” are so evil," Leatham wrote. “i dont know how to express how evil they are. many of them are just authoritarians … Not a single ‘rationalist’ cisfem stood up for me … i wont forget this.”

Parts of the rationalist community had become increasingly concerned about what LaSota and her acolytes might do next. “Do you know whether Ziz owns or has easy access to any weapons?” one member wrote on Facebook. “Does she currently have a plan to obtain a weapon?” A moderator on LessWrong wrote that “both Ziz and Gwen have a sufficient track record of being aggressive offline (and Ziz also online) that I don’t really want them around on LessWrong or to provide a platform to them.” One rationalist recalled that “CFAR spent a bunch of money hiring professional security.”

In turn, LaSota and the others wrote of vengeance against the “timeless” decisions of others. “If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice, i.e. their choice extending arbitrarily far into the past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them,” one LaSota ally wrote in a long blog post citing Ziz’s philosophies. In the comments, LaSota wrote, “I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal.”

In the spring of 2021, a rationalist named Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, died by suicide. Winterford had spent time on Caleb with LaSota and Danielson, where LaSota had described trying to “fix/upgrade” him, and for years he seemingly grappled with LaSota’s ideas as a way out of childhood traumas. To rationalist watchers of the group, Winterford seemed to constitute a second casualty of its ideology.

In court, by summer 2021, the four had turned against their own defense lawyers, accusing one of misconduct. A month later, representing herself, Leatham filed to have the state judge Shelly Averill disqualified from the case, on the grounds that she had “repeatedly misgendered me and my codefendants, including twice under penalty of perjury, and 10 times on the first court date after my writ petition where I told her misgendering me was bias and misconduct.” (Judge Averill admitted to misgendering Leatham, but replied that she did not “misspeak intentionally or in any way intend to cause party offense.” A higher court ruled against Leatham.)

Another Leatham filing included numbered objections like “2. Shelly Averill is evil.” “3. Shelly Averill has read my previous accusation that she is evil and has not denied that she is evil.” “5. … Shelly Averill has omnicidal intent—she wants to destroy everything—especially prioritizing that which is good.” And “11. I will never be a man, no matter how much humans like Shelly Averill want to eradicate that truth from existence.”

When their civil rights complaint for harassment and torture was thrown out, the four filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police and two administrators at Westminster Woods—whom they accused of intentionally fabricating the claim that one of them was armed, in order to prompt a stronger police response. They again asserted that the police had infringed on their speech, sexually assaulted them, and denied them food and medication in custody, amounting to torture. The police opposed a subpoena to release any video from the jail, calling them “privileged” files that would constitute “an undue burden” to sort through.

Even mired in their ongoing legal battles, the group still seemed to be expanding. Now hovering around the Zizian orbit was a figure named Alice Monday—whom LaSota had described as “sort of a mentor to me”—and Michelle Zajko, the young rationalist who compared the Westminster Woods response to a swatting. She was trans nonbinary, and a recent bioinformatics masters graduate from Pennsylvania. By the spring of 2022, an EA adherent and recent UC Berkeley student with chunky black glasses named Daniel Blank was also around. Blank, a cisgender man whose blog showed him captivated by LaSota’s ideas, was noted in the court file as having delivered one of Leatham’s lengthy objections to the court.

A few weeks later, after Danielson failed to show up for a hearing, Averill issued a bench warrant for her arrest. Then, at a hearing of the federal lawsuit, on August 19, the group’s attorney asked for a stay in the case. He said he believed that that Gwen Danielson had died by suicide.

One half of the founding Zizian brain trust was apparently gone. The other was soon to vanish as well.

Out on the waters of the San Francisco Bay that night of August 19, 2022, it was balmy and breezy, with a light swell. At 11:05, the Coast Guard command center in San Francisco received a distress call from a woman on a boat traveling south across the bay. The woman, Naomi LaSota, reported that her 31-year-old brother had fallen overboard, somewhere south of the Bay Bridge. Naomi, Ziz, and Borhanian had gone out for an afternoon sail on Ziz LaSota’s boat, the Black Cygnet. But as they were heading back to the marina, Naomi reported, her brother—as she referred to Ziz in her communications with the Coast Guard—had leaned over the motor and fallen in.

According to official Coast Guard logs obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request, the sister said her brother had not been wearing a life preserver, and she was “unable to determine exact location or area where brother fell overboard due to unfamiliarity with the boat.”

The Coast Guard deployed in force, knowing that time was of the essence. All available boats, helicopters, planes, and drones launched into action, including the marine rescue units of the Oakland and Alameda fire department marine rescue units.

The crews searched through the night, obtaining “fatigue waivers” to forgo their normal shifts to keep going. They ran patterns through the Bay out under the Golden Gate Bridge, from Yerba Buena Island all the way to Land’s End and back down the shore through San Francisco. They returned with only “negative results,” in search-and-rescue-speak. There was no sign of the person who’d fallen overboard.

At 3 am, LaSota’s sister called for assistance again. After the Coast Guard boats had moved on to where LaSota might have drifted, the other two had no idea how to sail back, and the Black Cygnet was now drifting near some rocks. A Coast Guard unit was diverted from the search to tow it into a marina. By 9 am, the operations center had coordinated with the missing boater’s other next of kin. At around 5 pm, after 18 hours, the Coast Guard told LaSota’s family that they were suspending the search. Their computer modeling, they said, showed LaSota could not have survived that long in the water.

More than two weeks later, an obituary appeared for LaSota in The Daily News-Miner, in Fairbanks. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” it read. That November, Naomi filed to obtain a death certificate for LaSota, with affidavits from herself and Borhanian recounting the incident, both of them using LaSota’s given, legal name. “No friends or family,” she wrote, had seen or heard from LaSota since August 19, 2022.

With LaSota and Danielson both presumed dead, the Zizian ideology started to feel like an afterthought in the rationalist community. Even before Danielson’s reported suicide and LaSota’s disappearance, some of the leading lights of rationalist thinking had taken to LessWrong to publicly discuss what the experiences around Ziz had meant, as if she no longer existed. “Ziz tried to create an anti-CFAR/MIRI splinter group whose members had mental breakdowns,” Scott Alexander, the author of the prominent Slate Star Codex blog, wrote in a lengthy discussion of MIRI, CFAR, and other mental health incidents that had taken place in the community. Another poster wrote: “The splinter group seems to have selected for high scrupulosity and not attenuated its mental impact.”

As for others who had been part of LaSota’s Bay Area circle, Michelle Zajko and Alice Monday appeared to have moved to the East Coast. Voter rolls from 2022 show them residing in Coventry, Vermont, on a 20-acre wooded property in an unfinished house, purchased more than one year earlier through an anonymous trust.

The two remaining Westminster Woods protesters, Borhanian and Leatham, had taken up a precarious residence on a property in Vallejo, northeast of San Francisco. Owned by an 80-year-old former shipworker and crane operator named Curtis Lind, the fenced-off land was pressed up against a steep hillside. Dotted with box trucks, decommissioned boats, and piles of junk, it gave the impression of a salvage yard. It was in a rough corner of town, a friend of Lind’s recalled—the site of drug dealings and shootings. On the opposite side of the hill was a waterfront featuring derelict boats and a regular homeless encampment.

Lind had decided to monetize the property; he brought in RVs and shipping containers and took on tenants to work and live cheaply in them. But the property lacked water or electricity. According to the friend, Lind had once blown out the neighborhood transformer by tapping it for power.

Borhanian and Leatham lived in an RV on the property and remained occupied with fighting the charges stemming from the protest. Each court filing of Leatham’s, who was by now attempting to represent herself, became harder to follow. In September 2022 she filed one titled “Notion of Motion and Motion to Dismiss the Imposter Police Officer from all Conflicting Positions on this Case, Including but not Limited to their Witnessed Reincarnations as Judge and District Attorney.”

There were other characters hanging around Borhanian and Leatham at the property, including a mysterious blond woman and another young rationalist named Suri Dao—who identified as “bi-gender” and blogged that she “preferred either she/her or he/him pronouns.” The group’s lease had been arranged years before by Gwen Danielson. But Lind claimed that no one had paid rent in years. By October he’d won a $60,000 judgement against the group, and was working to evict them.

What took place between the remaining group and Lind one Sunday morning that November would once again bisect reality into two irreconcilable versions. According to the account that Lind gave police—and that his tenant Patrick McMillan gave the local news—the group learned that the county sheriffs would be pursuing the eviction on November 15. On the morning of the 13th, Lind later alleged, Dao lured him out to their trailer by saying there was a water leak, and then multiple figures stabbed him with kitchen knives more than a dozen times, including through the eye. At some point Lind pulled a gun, and Leatham allegedly ran a samurai sword through his left shoulder and out from his stomach. Lind fired, killing Borhanian and wounding Leatham at least twice.

McMillan claimed he awoke to a knock at his door and found Lind standing at his trailer with the sword still protruding from his body. “He said ‘I’m dying!’ and he had blood squirting out of him,” McMillan told a local TV news reporter a few days later. “I guess they figured if they killed him, they couldn’t be evicted.”

When the police arrived, they found Borhanian dead, Leatham with gunshot wounds, and Lind bleeding from his eye with a sword sticking through his chest. The cops arrested Dao at the scene, while Leatham and Lind were both transported to the hospital. The blond friend of the group, who police said gave her name as Julia Dawson, was taken to the station for questioning. But after having what appeared to be a medical emergency, she was sent to the hospital as well. From there, she quietly slipped away.

When Leatham recovered from her injuries enough for the case to proceed, she and Dao were charged with the attempted murder of Lind and the felony murder of their own friend, Borhanian. (Although Lind had pulled the trigger, California law allows prosecutors to essentially charge instigators of a conflict with any murder that results from it.) Lind, among other injuries, lost an eye.

At least in the small group of supporters who showed up for Dao and Leatham at court hearings, another version of events took hold. Lind, according to this story, had been threatening and harassing the tenants for months, and that morning had entered their home and shot them unprompted. (It’s unclear, in this account, how Lind was stabbed through the chest and eye.) “Emma was no harm to anything or anyone,” a person close to Borhanian said in a 2022 interview, alleging that Lind’s story had changed over time. The group was being presumed guilty because they were neurodiverse, she said. “This man ended the life of this brilliant, brilliant woman.”

As the murder charges entered their long slog through the California courts, the other cases involving the original four protesters fell away. The protest charges were put on hold, and the group’s attorney in the federal civil rights lawsuit—which alleged the four were “tortured” after Westminster Woods—was preparing to withdraw from the case, saying he could no longer reach his clients. (The case was later dismissed.)

Two days after the sword attack, the Vallejo police contacted the Coast Guard command center to follow up on its missing boater case. One of the people who’d been on the boat when LaSota went missing, Emma Borhanian, been shot and killed in the Lind attack, they reported. But they had another startling discovery to share. LaSota herself was alive, and had been living in Vallejo “for the past six months,” the detective said. Julia Dawson, the woman who’d slipped away from the hospital, was Ziz LaSota.

Michelle Zajko grew up in an upscale neighborhood in the town of Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, just southwest of Philadelphia. A sharp and creative student who penned her own fantasy stories, she first became involved in the effective altruism movement as an undergraduate biology major at nearby Cabrini University, bringing an EA discussion group to campus. “I want to help save people for my career, but this is a way I can do it now,” she told her college newspaper in 2013. The same year, Zajko presented a paper about applying Bayesian decision theory in everyday life. “Because people maintain consistency in their beliefs, they often continue to make the same decisions, even if those decisions are not optimal,” she wrote. “Structuring one's decision-making strategies in accordance with mathematics and decision theory would result in outcomes that grant higher expected utility than using no strategies.” She earned a masters degree in bioinformatics from Temple University, and after a brief internship at NASA, took a job at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

By 2019, Zajko—known as Jamie in Ziz-connected circles—relocated to California, where she entered the wider rationalist social scene, and started dating Alice Monday. (Monday couldn’t be located for this story.) Monday was a controversial figure, accused on multiple blogs of physically and mentally abusing her housemates. Alex Leatham wrote that “about once a week for several months [Monday] would take a length of bamboo and beat my friend emma with it. this is their attempted new order.”

Monday never responded publicly to the accusations, and Zajko seemed not to have complaints of her own. “I had spoken with her while she was out in California, and she was very happy,” her aunt Rosanne Zajko told me. “She said that she and her girlfriend, Alice, would be moving to Vermont.” The Bay Area was expensive—“I think she used the word ‘soul-crushing,’” Rosanne said, “and they were looking for a change of scenery.” Monday and Zajko relocated together to Vermont by early 2021.

The Vermont property was isolated, just 20 miles from the Canadian border. “Long driveway and mountain top setting is really what sets this apart from most homes, total solitude,” a real estate listing noted. Rosanne says that Zajko became increasingly estranged from her family after she arrived in Vermont—an estrangement Rosanne attributes to Zajko’s California friends, including LaSota. “Michelle is a very very intelligent person,” Rosanne said. “She's always been a very independent thinker, someone who is intellectually curious. I see how she goes out there and wants to learn more, but how she actually got to fall under the influence of that group is something I do not understand and I have no answers for.”

In her online writings, Zajko expressed growing concern about anti-trans sentiments she saw in the news. “We’re already past the start of a trans genocide,” she wrote on her Tumblr in 2022. “If you don’t own a gun, consider getting one, learning to shoot it, and investigating community self-defense. Fascist militias are an arm of the anti-trans genocide who are acting as low-level enforcers.” She also alluded to what she described as past “abuse” by her parents. They’d threatened to go to a judge friend and have her put in foster care, even kill her if she ran away, she wrote. She said she’d “tried explaining” it to her aunt, Rosanne. “She sadly didn’t believe me,” Zajko wrote. “Some people don’t want to hear about the ugliness in the world, because then they’d feel obligated to do something about it.”

Rosanne’s recollection of these same events, and of Zajko’s parents, was irreconcilable with what her niece wrote. Some time after seeing the posts, she emailed Michelle. “I take issue with one of your posts where you said I knew about abuse but preferred to do nothing,” Rosanne wrote. “That was a huge surprise to me. I felt that you stabbed me in the back with that comment.” Rosanne had been a witness to disputes between Michelle and her parents, she said—even taken Michelle’s side—but said the arguments she knew of never amounted to anything approaching abuse. “Did she express to me any resentment or anger or hate against her parents? Not at all.”

In 2021, Michelle Zajko bought another half acre of land in Derby, 15 miles from Coventry. It’s unclear how long Monday and Zajko stayed together in Vermont. But in February 2022, Zajko blogged about having recently had long conversations with LaSota. The latter had accused Zajko of, essentially, gossiping about her with Monday and playing mind games. “Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did to her,” Zajko alleged, “was to murder Alice.” LaSota, according to the post, had told her how to construct a DIY suppressor for a gun, and suggested lye to get rid of the body. “And if I didn't do it,” she continued, “Ziz planned to drive across the entire continental United States to murder me.”

Zajko seemed to vacillate between suspecting it might all be a rhetorical game, and genuinely believing Ziz intended to kill her and Monday both. “Ziz, like myself, does not forgive or forget, not even after years have passed,” she wrote. “While I have the tenacity, skill, and willingness to evade Ziz and her friends indefinitely, it's a waste of resources. We're currently facing the collapse of civilization, a looming civil war, unfriendly AI, and a fuckton of other threats, and instead of focusing on those, we're wasting resources respectively hunting and evading each other.”

The conversation seemed unresolved. But between musings on Dune and Siths, Zajko drew what would later come to feel like a crucial distinction: between the “the world where I'm a complete psycopath [sic],” killing to please Ziz, and the one “where I kill my abuser.”

Back in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, Michelle Zajko’s parents lived in the stately four bedroom home they’d owned since the late 1980s. Richard and Rita Zajko had raised Michelle there, in a cul-de-sac development with other young families. Richard worked for a company that had a contract with the nearby Navy yard, while Rita stayed home. Now that Michelle, an only child, was out of the house and the couple was in their late sixties and early seventies, their life was quiet, arranged around a tight circle of concern. Rita’s parents were ill and lived nearby, said Rosanne, and a lot of Rita and Richard’s time “was taken up in caring for them.”

Toward the end of 2022, Rosanne had fallen into the habit of talking to Rita every Sunday. “We were both caregivers,” she said—Rita for her parents, and now Rosanne for her husband, Rick’s brother, who was on the verge of entering memory care. “It was grueling and draining,” she said, and she knew Rita could understand.

“On December 31, I put it out there in the universe: Can 2023 be the year where I have no catastrophes?” Rosanne recalled thinking. “Can it be a good year?” The next morning she texted Rita to wish her a happy New Year, but received no reply.

Three days later, Rosanne said, she got a call from another of Rick’s brothers. “I don’t know why he would be calling, but let me pick it up,” she remembered thinking. “He just comes out with it and says ‘Rick and Rita have been murdered.’”

Sometime late on New Year’s Eve, the police later determined, someone had killed the couple inside their home, shooting them each in the head with a 9mm handgun. There was no sign of a break-in, and the authorities quickly concluded that the assailant must be someone the couple knew. According to a search warrant application in the case, Ring camera footage from across the street had captured a car pulling up to the house at 11:29 that night. Two minutes later, “a higher-pitched voice is heard shouting what sounds like ‘Mom!’” followed by “Oh my god! Oh God! God!” Two figures are then recorded entering the house, then exiting nine minutes later and driving away.

The Zajkos, two sources familiar with the case later confirmed to me, had been killed in Michelle’s childhood bedroom. December 31 was her birthday.

Rosanne was devastated. “I stayed on the floor,” she says. “I wasn't comprehending it: How can this happen to Rita and Rick of all people?” She wondered briefly why Michelle hadn’t called to deliver the news. “Like, she has to know, but why didn’t she call and tell us?” she remembers thinking. But then she thought: “How would I react if I got the news that both of my parents were murdered? I would be in shock.”

Three days after the bodies were discovered, on January 5, a pair of Pennsylvania state troopers traveled to Vermont to interview Michelle Zajko. They found her at the Coventry property, along with the 24-year-old Daniel Blank—the rationalist from Berkeley who had once delivered court documents for Alex Leatham.

One of the troopers, Matthew Gibson, later testified that Zajko told them she was “uncertain of when she would come back to the Commonwealth in order to make final arrangements for her parents.” According to the search warrant affidavit, she told the troopers she hadn’t spoken to her parents since the previous January, that she’d been in Vermont with Blank on New Year’s Eve, and that she hadn’t been to Pennsylvania since before the Covid pandemic.

The officers asked Zajko if she had any guns on the property. She said they did, and retrieved a 9mm Smith & Wesson. Gibson testified that he “held it in Vermont” and “inspected it.” Two sources also confirmed to me that the troopers had seen a shooting range on the property, and that the Pennsylvania State Police had discovered that Zajko and the others had turned their phones off in the hours leading up to the murder, making it difficult to track their whereabouts. With no warrant to confiscate the gun, however, Gibson handed it back, and the officers returned home.

On January 9, the Pennsylvania State Police got a call from the medical examiner in Delaware County. Zajko had arrived unexpectedly, seeking death certificates for her parents. The police tracked her to a nearby hotel called Candlewood Suites, but waited to approach her again.

On the morning of January 12, Michelle arrived alone at the small graveside ceremony for her parents. Wearing a mask, she told Rosanne she’d been ill and didn’t want to spread germs. Rosanne recalls her seeming paranoid, gesturing at some of Rick’s former colleagues she didn’t recognize. “Who are those men?” she asked.

Then, at 9 pm that evening, the police arrived at the hotel. They’d secured a warrant to obtain Zajko’s DNA and search her hotel room and car for the Smith & Wesson—“believed to potentially be the murder weapon of Richard and Rita Zajko,” Gibson testified.

When Zajko came to the door of her second-floor room, she acknowledged the officers but was slow to open it. The police used a key card to enter. They detained Zajko and took her down to the lobby, but as they passed through, she shouted at the hotel staff to tell Daniel Blank that she’d been arrested. “He’s staying in room 111!” she said, according to Gibson. The trooper recognized Blank’s name from the Vermont trip and gathered some officers to approach 111, which Blank had rented under the name “Daniel Black.” When Gibson knocked on the door, Blank refused to open it and asked for a lawyer.

Instead, the officers left to obtain a warrant. They reviewed the previous night’s footage from the Candlewood Suites security cameras and determined that Zajko had carried a bag down to room 111, knocked, and left it outside the door. A judge found it sufficient probable cause for a warrant, and the police returned to the hotel at 12:30 am. This time, when no one answered the door to 111, a vice unit breached the room. They heard the shower running and found Blank hiding in the bathroom—along with a blond-haired figure they hadn’t expected, dressed in black.

Blank was thrown to the ground and cuffed, but cooperated as he was walked out of the room. The other person in the room, whom troopers would later describe as being 6'2" inches and 200 pounds, was sprawled on the bathroom floor with eyes closed. “He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground,” another trooper, Matthew Smith, later testified. Four officers carried this other figure out of the room. In the lobby, a trooper physically placed the person’s finger onto a mobile fingerprint scanner.

A hit came up for an open warrant, in California. It was for Ziz LaSota, under her birth name.

The troopers sent LaSota to the hospital, where doctors said there seemed to be nothing wrong with her. She was placed under arrest, then charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police investigation.

The troopers searched Zajko’s Green 2013 Subaru, parked at the hotel, and discovered $40,000 in cash under the front passenger seat. In Blank’s pocket they found a receipt for it, from a Bank of America branch in Vermont. (Later, surveillance footage from the branch would show Blank pacing back and forth as he awaited the money, then pulling out and unwrapping a cell phone covered in foil.)

In LaSota and Blank’s room, 111, the police found a light colored cloth bag containing a Smith & Wesson 9mm—with a serial number matching the one troopers had seen in Vermont—and five boxes of ammunition.

By that point, however, Blank and Zajko had been released. They never came back for the cash, or the car. Only LaSota remained in custody.

I started attending LaSota’s court hearings in May 2023, at a columned Pennsylvania courthouse in the town center of Media, just over five miles from Zajko’s childhood home. Eighteen weeks after her arrest, LaSota remained in jail, a judge having initially set bail at $500,000—an inconceivable amount for two misdemeanors—before reducing it to $50,000. On an early May morning in Judge Richard Cappelli’s courtroom, between a litany of DUIs and petty drug crimes, the clerk called the case.

LaSota appeared by video—there’d been a snafu with the prisoner-transportation system from the jail—but I couldn’t see her face from where I was sitting in the gallery. Representing her in the courtroom was Daniel McGarrigle, an attorney with slicked-back gray hair and a trim beard. He’d come prepared to argue that the charges should be dismissed. The police hadn’t come to Candlewood Suites to arrest or even investigate LaSota, he noted to me later, and closing one’s eyes and lying on the floor was hardly typical “disorderly conduct.” “Annoying or frustrating the police is not a crime,” McGarrigle told me. As for the murders, he said, “I won’t speak to rumors. I only speak to evidence. The evidence I’ve seen so far—that the Commonwealth has presented so far—has shown me that my client is not guilty of any crime in Pennsylvania.”

On this morning, though, Cappelli adjourned the hearing until a date when the defendant could be transported to the courtroom. LaSota responded bitterly. “I’ve been here for four months,” she said, “which I think is even longer than the suggested sentence. It’s me languishing in jail for another week for no reason, so I’m not going to say I agree with it.”

A few weeks later, LaSota finally appeared in person, in a forest green jumpsuit and handcuffs, her unkept blond hair swept partly across her face and below her shoulders. She was wearing a blue surgical mask and sat rigidly still through the hearing, where the state would put on evidence to counter McGarrigle’s motion to quash the charges. Unlike the California courts, which made the occasional pretense of acknowledging the Zizians’ chosen genders, in Pennsylvania LaSota was only “he.” After testimony from troopers Gibson and Smith about the events at the Candlewood Suites, the prosecutor argued that LaSota had “recklessly created a risk and a hazardous condition to the troopers that had to physically remove a 6'2", 200-pound man.”

Behind these arguments, and even the charges themselves, lay a deeper motive: Unable to charge for the Zajko murders but suspecting that LaSota, Michelle Zajko, and Daniel Blank could be tied to them, prosecutors were trying desperately to hold LaSota while the police gathered evidence. “Obviously you realize we don't give a shit about this case,” one local official familiar with it told me. What they were interested in was LaSota’s involvement in the homicide.

Once out of jail, LaSota would be “in the wind,” the official said. Authorities wouldn’t see LaSota again until she resurfaced “in somebody else's prison.”

But from another angle, the authorities seemed oddly passive about what already amounted to a kind of alleged crime spree. LaSota had an active bench warrant in Sonoma County, California, on the felony charge related to the protest. She’d arguably committed another crime in faking her death, since causing the Coast Guard to commit resources to save lives when no one is in danger is a federal felony—punishable by up to six years in prison. And according to the police in Vallejo, she’d fled the scene of the sword attack and shooting, making her at minimum a potential person of interest in a murder case. But no California law enforcement showed up in Pennsylvania looking to collect their charge, or even to question her.

Even more strangely, perhaps, despite having found the Smith & Wesson in LaSota and Blank’s hotel room, prosecutors never charged her in connection to the weapon. Under Pennsylvania law, it’s illegal to possess a gun while a fugitive from justice. “I don’t know that the charges would have had legs,” the official told me, since the gun could have belonged to Blank. But in the court hearings on LaSota’s bail, the discovery of the gun never even came up.

The only person I’d seen in the gallery who seemed tuned into the hearings was a beefy fifty- or sixtysomething white-haired man, sporting a goatee and wearing a black polo. He gave off the vibe of a private investigator, and when I introduced myself he confirmed as much, declining to give his name. “You can call me … Cliff,” he said, unconvincingly. We shared our bafflement at $500,000-to-$50,000 bail, and I asked why he was there. “Some people in California are interested in this case,” he said. “They’re afraid of this individual.”

That fear was evident among some rationalists as news of the violent incidents surrounding LaSota had spread. “I don’t want Ziz to ever think about me, ever,” a person involved in the Bay Area rationalist community said in an interview in 2023. “I think I know enough to be correctly scared of Ziz.”

That June, Judge Cappelli ruled against quashing the charges but reduced LaSota’s bail to $10,000, unsecured—meaning LaSota could sign a payment pledge and walk out. McGarrigle informed the court that LaSota’s mother had flown in from Alaska, “and she will take him home and make sure he comes back for all the court dates.” The prosecutor seemed skeptical. “The Commonwealth’s concern is the flight,” he told the judge. “There is literally zero ties to the community.” What were the odds LaSota would show up for the next court date, in late August?

Around the same time, Michelle Zajko called her aunt Rosanne. They hadn’t spoken since the graveside service for Michelle’s parents that January. She hadn’t shown up at the memorial mass where Rosanne had eulogized Rita and Rick. But now Michelle was calling with a message: “She told me she wasn’t responsible” for the murders, Rosanne said. “But she said that she knew who was.” She told her aunt that “LessWrong did it,” and that she was “being targeted.”

Not long after, the trust that owned the house in Coventry, Vermont, where Michelle had lived with Alice Monday, sold it off. Michelle and Blank were both gone, having left the previous winter. When realtors came to inspect the property, they found the house had not been winterized, causing the pipes to burst. One of Blank’s family members, meanwhile, filed a national missing persons report, noting that he had last been seen in Pennsylvania, wore thick glasses, and had one eye that didn’t follow the other.

When LaSota’s court appearance came, on the morning of August 21, 2023, the courtroom gallery was full of defendants waiting to be called for the day’s pleas. Shortly after court was gaveled into session, an older woman with gray-blond hair pushed a wheelchair into the back of the courtroom. In it, slumped to one side and dressed in flowing black, was LaSota. Now her hair too was black, and appeared even more disheveled than when she’d been in jail. She was wearing what appeared to be an industrial N95 respirator mask, with valves on either side. McGarrigle, approaching his client in the back of the courtroom, seemed surprised. “What’s going on?” he said, leaning in. “I mean, what’s going on with your health?”

When LaSota’s case was called, the woman I later learned was LaSota’s mother wheeled her to the front, where she sat impassively in the chair, gazing blankly at the floor.

A new prosecutor had replaced the old one, and requested a continuance to get on top of all the facts. The judge assented, pushing the trial to December. “I just want the record to reflect that the defendant is here, and we’re ready,” McGarrigle said, before LaSota’s mother wheeled her back out through the doors.

Two months later, I traveled to Sonoma County, the home of Westminster Woods and the scene of the protest that had seemingly begun this great unraveling. I met Sergeant Brian Parks at the local Starbucks. After hearing his account of the original arrests, I asked him why—given the open felony warrant—his department hadn’t come after LaSota once she was arrested in Pennsylvania. “Right now if I were to look at the system, there are probably 75 felony bench warrants,” Parks said. “We don’t have the luxury of trying to serve” them all, he said. “We’re understaffed right now.”

I told him what I’d heard in Pennsylvania from a source close to the case, that the authorities there had contacted Sonoma County about taking their prisoner. “I heard there was some communication between us and the agency in Pennsylvania,” Parks said. “I don’t know to what extent, so I really don’t want to comment on that.”

But did it frustrate him, I asked, that the original case felt like it would never get prosecuted? “I personally am not going to lose sleep over this matter,” he said. “If they were here and running amok still, or running amok anywhere in the United States, causing concern for other agencies and people of our communities, then yeah, I’d want them prosecuted.”

The next day, I drove to Vallejo. I’d arranged to meet Curtis Lind at the property where he had lost his eye and Emma Borhanian had been killed. It remained scattered with containers and trailers, and a friend of Lind’s had told me there were still tenants living there. I’d talked to Lind briefly the day before. But that morning I got a call from another friend of Lind’s, who said he’d changed his mind. He didn’t want to “say anything that would change the case,” she told me. “Or would make them come after him again.”

The murder cases against Alex Leatham and Suri Dao, meanwhile, had sunk into a seemingly endless quagmire. To the distress of Leatham and her family, she was being housed in a men’s jail despite demanding to be placed in a women’s. And to the bafflement of Dao’s lawyers, Dao demanded to be placed in a men’s lockup after being assigned to a women’s. In the year since their arrest, both had been accused by prosecutors of escape attempts. Back in late 2022, at the hospital following her gunshot wounds, Leatham had allegedly pretended to be asleep on a bench, and when the deputy guarding her had gone to the bathroom, managed to shuffle to an exit in leg shackles. She was captured 20 feet outside the door. She’d allegedly tried again outside a February hearing, requesting a wheelchair and then running for it, getting as far as a nearby fence. Dao, in the summer of 2023, had allegedly faked a seizure in a cell, then tried to run past the guards. According to the incident report, Dao had injured a hand trying to prevent the guards from shutting the door, and then “banged her head on the cell window” while waiting for an ambulance.

Both defendants’ lawyers argued that their clients were mentally incompetent to stand trial. This despite Leatham’s objecting to having a lawyer at all, much less being declared insane. In her letters to the judge and outbursts in court, she insisted her thinking was not only sane but logical. “My coercively assigned council do not represent me,” she wrote in July of 2023. “I am rational. I do not have a ‘mental illness’ and I do not need ‘treatment.’”

In some way, it felt like the theories that LaSota and Danielson had first spun up on their one-tug Rationalist Fleet were crashing into the messy reality of the justice system. Writing to the court, Leatham offered a rationalist-like case for her own rationality. “Yesterday I believed different things than I do today and tomorrow my beliefs about the world will change again. Yet I still complete plans I made yesterday,” she wrote. “Everything I have said before the court is the truth according to the epistemic state I was in when I said it.”

The Judge disagreed. Based on testimony of doctors, he ruled that Leatham was “developmentally disabled and incapable of cooperating with counsel in the conduct of their defense, and understanding the nature and purpose of the proceedings now pending against them.” Leatham was committed to a mental health facility in Porterville, California, for a maximum of four years. Leatham would only go to trial if the facility, and then the judge, determined she’d returned to fitness.

In August 2023, Dao's attorneys asked that the criminal proceedings be suspended, believing that Dao was incompetent to stand trial. In a filing to the court, they wrote that their client had been suffering from depression, psychosis, and suicidal thoughts since the termination of their hormone therapy and had begun engaging in “self-mutilation.” Dao, they told the court, “will not speak to attorneys, doctors, the court, or anyone else,” “lacks awareness of court proceedings,” and “appears mentally vacant, incognizant, and to be suffering from some type of dissociative identity disorder.” Dao’s own attorneys also cited “transgender issues”—including their client’s wish to be referred to as “they” and placed in a men’s jail—as an “objective manifestation” of Dao’s incompetence. The case remained bogged down in mental health evaluations and hospital stays, and as 2023 bled into 2024, neither Leatham nor Dao was any closer to going to trial in California.

On the morning of LaSota’s rescheduled trial in Pennsylvania four months later, Judge Cappelli plowed through a half dozen cases before calling CR-962-23. The prosecutor and LaSota’s defense attorney Daniel McGarrigle strode to the bench. But no wheelchair rolled into the room. LaSota and her mother were nowhere to be found in the gallery.

“Good morning, your honor,” McGarrigle said. “I’m ready for trial. I have not had contact with my client since the last time we were here.” In those four months, he’d spoken to LaSota’s family, he said, but not LaSota directly, “and I’m unable to provide an update on my client’s whereabouts at this time.”

The judge gave McGarrigle until the following morning to reach his client. When he couldn’t, the court issued a bench warrant for LaSota’s arrest. As of December 2023, Ziz LaSota, wanted in two states, was officially in the wind.

Many years ago, a thought experiment emerged out of the rationalist community called “Roko’s basilisk.” First posed on LessWrong by a user named Roko in 2010—and named for a mythical reptile that can kill with its glance—the premise loosely stated is this: If and when superintelligent AI emerges in the future, capable of dominating and subjugating humans, it will be inclined to punish those who tried to prevent it from coming into existence. Indeed, this superintelligent overlord may be inclined to punish even those who failed to spend their lives working to bring it into existence. If you knew that artificial superintelligence was possible, the thinking goes, yet still didn’t devote your life to helping create it, it may subject you to unfathomable torture for that choice.

Roko’s basilisk contained within it two insidious and mind-bending premises. The first was that merely being aware of the thought experiment instantly made you its potential victim. In the language of the rationalist community, it was an “infohazard.” The second was the implication that an entity from the future—one that didn’t yet exist, and perhaps never would—could somehow blackmail people in the present to help bring about its existence. “Work for my benefit,” the future AI would be telling us, “or I will subject you to unimaginable pain.” The idea so roiled the community that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the co-founder of LessWrong, banned mention of it from the forum entirely.

When Ziz LaSota first encountered Roko’s basilisk in the mid-2010s, in her early years among the rationalists, she was inclined to dismiss it. Yudkowsky had by then declared that its premise was unfounded—“there’s no incentive for a future agent to follow through with the threat,” he wrote, “because by doing so it just expends resources at no gain to itself.” He’d even un-banned it from LessWrong. But still, LaSota later wrote, “I started encountering people who were freaked out by it, freaked out they had discovered an ‘improvement’ to the infohazard that made it function, got around Eliezer’s objection.”

For a while she was able to dismiss these “improvements.” But the more she thought about Roko’s basilisk, the more she began to suffer from “intrusive thoughts about basilisks”—not just Roko’s but others which she could never name. “Eventually I came to believe, in the gaps of frantically trying not to think about it,” she wrote, “that if I persisted in trying to save the world, I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly AIs.”

Upon discovering that her actions might lead to infinite torture and then examining her own resolve, LaSota was surprised to find that it held. She refused to be blackmailed, she concluded, by what might come. “Evil gods must be fought,” she wrote. “If this damns me then so be it.”

The more time I spent following the group that some called the Zizians, the more their story started seeming itself like some kind of basilisk. Just by virtue of having examined its events, you were trapped in its world, subject to its terms. Inside that world it felt like some future evil was rapidly approaching, ominous events waiting just beyond the horizon. But speaking of them could usher them faster, closer. I was certain the story as I understood it was incomplete, but unsure where to look to complete it. Or if I did, whether I could tell it without attracting the basilisk’s gaze myself.

So I set the story aside, and waited.

On January 14 of this year, authorities got a call from a hotel employee near Lyndonville, Vermont, about 30 miles from Michelle Zajko's old place in Coventry. Two people had checked in wearing “all-black tactical-style clothing with protective equipment,” the employee said, according to court documents. One was carrying a gun, in a visible holster. (Open carry of firearms is legal in Vermont.) Agents from Homeland Security accompanied the Vermont State Police in responding to the call, and they “attempted to initiate a consensual conversation” with the black-clad guests. The pair—Teresa Youngblut and Ophelia Bauckholt—said they had come to the area to look for property, but declined to elaborate. They checked out that same day and relocated to nearby Newport. The police, meanwhile, kept them under sporadic surveillance.

Two days later, on the opposite coast, it appeared the trials of Leatham and Dao were, at long last, going forward. They’d both been declared competent, and in August, Curtis Lind had provided a long videotaped account of his version of events to prosecutors. Now, on January 16, in anticipation of a spring trial date, prosecutors filed a motion noting that “Mr. Lind is the only eye-witness to this case and his testimony is critical for the People to have the ability to prove their case.”

Lind, now 82, had put the Vallejo land up for sale after the incident, and even received an all-cash offer of $300,000. But he couldn’t bring himself to sell. He’d cleared off the tenants and the junk, but somehow over time both had drifted back. “He was there every day,” one friend said, commuting more than an hour in each direction from Half Moon Bay. “For what? Just puttering around, from what I saw.”

Lind still worried about someone taking vengeance for the attack, the friend said. “He mentioned a few times that they might come back and finish the job. He was, like, a wait-and-see character. Well, we’ll wait and see what happens, you know?”

January 17 was a clear, chilly day at the property. Lind was walking on Lemon Street, one block away, when a man wearing a black beanie, a mask, and a purple shirt emerged from hiding. The attacker approached Lind, put an arm around his neck, and began to stab him in the chest. Before fleeing, the man slit Lind’s throat. When the police arrived, they found Lind unresponsive but still alive. He died at the hospital within the hour.

On January 19, in downtown Newport, Vermont, the law enforcement agents who had Youngblut and Bauckholt under “periodic surveillance” spotted them again in the same tactical gear, gun included. The next day, agents observed the pair at Walmart, where Bauckholt bought two boxes of aluminum foil. The agents saw Bauckholt wrapping two items in the foil, which would later turn out to be cell phones. Bauckholt made a call from another phone, and then the duo left, driving a blue Toyota Prius hatchback with North Carolina plates.

The Homeland Security agents had determined—wrongly, as it turned out—that Bauckholt, a German citizen, had an expired visa. So as the pair was driving down Interstate 91, three Border Patrol vehicles flipped on their lights and pulled the car over. According to federal prosecutors, Youngblut stepped out from the driver’s seat, pulled out a Glock handgun, and fired at the agents, who began firing back. Bauckholt tried to draw a gun too. In the exchange, a Border Patrol agent named David “Chris” Maland was killed, along with Bauckholt. Youngblut was shot but alive, transported to a local hospital.

Several days later in Redding, California, the police arrested 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder and charged him with Curtis Lind’s murder. Snyder, a Seattle-area native, had attended the prestigious private Lakeside School before obtaining a computer science and philosophy degree from Oxford. “I would like to help advance the technological frontier of humanity in a responsible manner,” he’d written on his LinkedIn, “by contributing original research in the fields of artificial general intelligence and AI alignment.”

While the murder of Lind might have remained a regional story, the killing of Maland—a 44-year-old US Air Force veteran and a nine-year member of the Border Patrol—was quickly national news. But it was local reporters who began to piece together the alleged connections, starting in Vermont. The regional news outlet VT Digger reported that a federal filing in Youngblut’s case indicated that the person who allegedly purchased both guns for the duo was “a person of interest” in a double murder in Pennsylvania who had lived near Coventry. They didn’t give the person’s name, but as soon as I saw it I knew: Michelle Zajko.

The same filing argued that Youngblut, who was charged with forcible assault with a deadly weapon and discharging a firearm, should be detained while awaiting trial. Prosecutors noted that both Youngblut and Zajko “are acquainted with and have been in frequent contact with an individual who was detained by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during that homicide investigation; that individual is also a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.” The facts fit Ziz LaSota.

Reporters in Vallejo and Seattle uncovered a marriage license application between Snyder and Youngblut, who’d also attended Lakeside. Both were known in rationalist and effective altruist circles, as was Bauckholt. Bauckholt had been a quant trader who’d worked in New York and interned at Jane Street Capital, the same firm that once employed Sam Bankman-Fried. They were all young, technically gifted strivers, and their involvement summoned the kind of shocked responses that echoed those elicited by Borhanian and Leatham, years before. “She seemed like a friendly nerd,” one friend of Baukholt’s from the rationalist community told me. “She was very into math and hosted some community discussion channels on Discord. I never knew she knew Ziz at all.” Youngblut, who’d gone on to study computer science at the University of Washington, “was rather quiet, reserved,” a high school classmate of both Youngblut’s and Snyder’s recalled. “She seemed incredibly harmless.” Her family, similar to Daniel Blank’s, had attempted to file a missing person’s report for her months before. Snyder, by contrast, could come off as “macho” or “obnoxious,” the classmate said. “It's shocking to even imagine the two of them, like, interacting, let alone interacting deeply enough to pursue a marriage certificate.”

Soon the national and international media was flooding in, trying to understand who and what the “Zizians” were. A “trans vegan death cult”? An “offshoot of the rationalist movement”? An “antifascist cult”? Anarchists? The events were immediately sucked up into the maw of the culture-war machine, recycled as a story of wokeness gone wild, a story of police overreach, an immigration story, or one about the inevitable product of an anti-trans culture.

In early February, Snyder dictated a 1,500-word letter to reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, which the paper printed in full. In it, Snyder opened by saying, “I am not one of Ziz’s friends,” implicitly disclaiming the group’s involvement in his alleged killing of the lone witness in their upcoming murder trial. He spent the rest of the statement addressing Eliezer Yudkowsky, half lecturing, half pleading with him to accept that animals are people, and bragging about his D&D skills.

Besides LaSota, Blank, and Zajko, it’s unclear whether there might be other adherents to LaSota’s ideas still at large, directly connected to the group or not. Gwen Danielson’s father recently told the Chronicle that rumors of her suicide were false. He’d spoken to her in recent months, he said. She had split from the group and was “completely under the radar.” As for LaSota, the Associated Press reported that she’d been last spotted by the landlord of a North Carolina AirBnb as recently as December, seemingly staying with Youngblut and Bauckholt at a pair of condos where the group kept a box truck parked outside.

Then, last Sunday afternoon, near the town of Frostburg in western Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania border, a man saw a pair of white box trucks parked up a dirt road on his property. In and around them he found three people, dressed all in black. They asked if he would let them camp on the property for a month. Instead, he called the police, saying that he recognized the group from news reports.

A pair of Maryland State Troopers and units from the local Sheriff's Office responded. According to a criminal complaint, the lead trooper, Brandon Jeffries, first spotted Daniel Blank, seated in the cab of one of the trucks. When Jeffries ordered him to show his hands, Blank responded that he had a learning disability and couldn’t understand.

While another trooper covered Blank, Jeffries and the Sheriff’s deputies approached the other truck, where Jeffries had seen a figure wiping fog from the window. When they pulled open the back door, they found LaSota and Zajko, both wearing ammo belts. The pair fled to the cab through an inner doorway, and then refused to exit the truck. At Lasota’s feet was a handgun. Zajko “was crying,” Jeffries wrote in the complaint, “saying not to kill her.” The pair wouldn’t give their names, and after Zajko tucked her hands into her armpits, the police took her to the ground. When they did, an officer found another handgun, loaded with 12 rounds, tucked into her waistband.

All three were arrested for trespassing and obstructing an officer. Zajko was charged with possession of the handgun, LaSota for transporting another gun found in the vehicle. In their new booking photos, compared to their last public images, Zajko now had close-cropped hair and Blank seemed to have put on weight. But LaSota, with her long sandy-blond hair, looked strikingly similar to how she had five years before, when she was arrested at Westminster Woods.

On Tuesday, they were ordered held without bail until a hearing in March. The same day, federal prosecutors in Vermont charged Michelle with providing a false address when she purchased two of the guns used in the Border Patrol shootout.

In the wake of the January 2025 murders and the ensuing media maelstrom, many in the rationalist community turned, as they always had, to the pseudonymous safety of LessWrong. There they tried to make sense of what happened, worried over how the public would now view them and their causes, and warned each other against speaking to journalists. One poster suggested, tentatively, that whatever the “Zizians” were, or are, might be the product of seeing the world too starkly through rationalist eyes. “I haven't seen others on LW with this sentiment, maybe they've felt afraid to express it (as I do),” the person wrote. “They were alienated altruists who couldn't handle this world and seemingly went a little insane. (given the incorrect beliefs about decision theory). Most people struggle to stay dispassionately rational when faced with something which they regard as very morally bad. It is hard to live in a world one believes to contain atrocities.”

The MIRI, CFAR, EA triumvirate promised not just that you could be the hero of your own story, but that your heroism could be deployed in the service of saving humanity itself from certain destruction. Is it so surprising that this promise attracted people who were not prepared to be bit players in group housing dramas and abstract technical papers? That they might come to believe, perhaps in the throes of their own mental health struggles, that saving the world required a different kind of action—by them, specifically, and no one else?

To Rosanne Zajko, whose family had actually suffered atrocities difficult to comprehend, each revelation leading up to Michelle's arrest, and each day without a resolution, had been like a new wound. She’d wanted to see her niece caught, she said. But whatever the legal system produced would never constitute a complete explanation. “She's a smart person and she's a logical person,” she said, “and this kind of behavior does not sound smart or logical to me.”

Logic. Rationality. Intelligence. Somewhere in all these attempts to harness them for our shared humanity, they’d been warped and twisted to destroy it.

One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 2022, one month before she supposedly went overboard in the San Francisco Bay. “Statists come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons,” she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who’d embraced her ideas. “Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod?”—a German song that translates as “come, sweet death.” “Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility?”

Below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

A few hours later, she offered up another thought. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” she wrote, “with a kill count of 0.”

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