Questioning Everything Propaganda
2nd Edition
by Jason Page
For Andrey Price — Speedy — whose light is still in the work. missingandreyprice.com
A note to the reader: this book is the chronicle. The vision — the philosophy Andrey built and the essay written in response to it — is told in the companion volume, The Universal of One True Free Eternal Love, with The Quest for Soul-Mate and Universal Law (by Andrey Price with Jason Page). That book is best read alongside this one. What follows here is the ground the philosophy grew in — and what happened to the man who grew it.
by Jason Page
I did not know about this collaboration while Andrey was alive.
In June of 2024, Andrey Price was found unresponsive in an alley in Culver City, California. He had been missing since March 23rd, 2017 — seven years of silence, of not knowing, of hoping that the universe had not wasted the node. The silence ended with news that could not be undone.
In the grief that followed, I went back to his work. And it was there — in the January 13th, 2017 revision of The Universe of One True Free Eternal Love — that I found something I had not known existed: the unmistakable echo of words I had written the day before. The quantum framing of soul mate. The soul path continuum. The idea that a missed encounter does not foreclose the path but opens it to another. Ideas I had written on January 12th, 2017, had entered his work on January 13th, 2017 — within twenty-four hours — and I had not known. He had not told me. And then he was gone, and I discovered it alone, seven years later, in a document that had been sitting in a folder the whole time.
That discovery is why I am writing this book. For closure. And because this situation — a person of extraordinary inner life, undone by illness and a system that could not hold him, leaving behind work that most of the world never saw — is not unique. It is not isolated. It is happening constantly, quietly, to people whose voices never find the infrastructure they need to be heard. I want this book to be part of that infrastructure, however small.
His situation is unique and yet utterly common. Mental illness without adequate support. A healthcare system that made him wait two years for a therapist while he deteriorated. Manipulative influences that exploited his mind when it was most vulnerable. Privacy laws that prevented the people who loved him from even confirming he was alive. These are not Andrey's failures. They are ours — structural, systemic, and correctable, if we choose to correct them.
It is my hope that this book helps establish precedent for policy exceptions that respect these cases: exceptions within privacy laws to allow concerned family members at least preliminary information on a loved one's health or condition; measures that can warrant treatment when a person's insight into their own illness has deteriorated to the point where they can no longer protect themselves.
Andrey deserved better. So does everyone in his situation.
What follows is the chronicle of our relationship and how it went astray — the formation of the friendship, the bad influence, the walk across America, the last night I saw him, and the years of searching that followed. It is through the process of making something — of art, of writing, of witness — that healing finds its way toward understanding.
Andrey's nickname while in Chicago was Speedy. I am not entirely sure where it came from — it may have been the speed of his mind, the way he could move through ten ideas in a single sentence and arrive somewhere unexpected and true. It may have been the way he moved through the world: fast, untethered, never quite settled in any one place long enough for the ground to feel solid under him. Either way, it fit. And it stuck.
We met through Occupy Chicago, where Andrey was doing what he did everywhere: thinking out loud, challenging received ideas, trying to build something. He had a research binder on everything — economics, quantum mechanics, psychotronics, the architecture of power, the hidden structure of reality. Most people treated the binder the way they treated Andrey himself: with the kind of polite dismissal that is really just discomfort with someone whose mind moves too fast to follow comfortably. I did not treat it that way. I was interested. And that interest, I think, was what connected us.
Our friendship was built in ordinary moments. Cooking together. Long conversations that started with philosophy and ended somewhere in the middle of the night with neither of us sure how we had arrived. Andrey's artwork on the walls of his apartment — bright, chaotic, full of feeling. The way he would stop mid-sentence, look at something invisible in the middle distance, and then return with an observation that made everything that came before it click into place.
We both called this the actualization of nodes. Two paths crossing and producing something that neither could have produced alone.
Before his worst relapse, Andrey had been pulled into the orbit of a man I will call Tin — someone who had appeared on the edges of Occupy Chicago and attached himself to Andrey with the particular intensity of someone who recognizes an unusually capable mind and knows how to exploit it.
Tin had Andrey working on ambitious petitions — the Homestead Act, reparations — pouring enormous energy into projects with increasingly unrealistic expectations, doing work Tin told him to keep secret, to not publish, to not share. He told Andrey that everyone was stupid and not to make friends. He isolated him slowly, turning Andrey's natural suspicion of institutions into a wall between Andrey and the people who genuinely loved him.
When Andrey burned out, Tin offered nothing. No financial support, no emotional support. Just withdrawal. He dropped Andrey when Andrey could no longer be useful.
We later discovered Tin had an FBI file — he had nearly been sentenced to life in prison for bomb threats, and had avoided conviction on grounds of mental illness. He had recognized in Andrey something he could use, and he had used it.
The effort to extract Andrey from Tin's influence was slow and painful. I watched Andrey drink a bottle of whisky every day during that period. I would move the bottle to the top of the kitchen cabinet so that reaching for it required physical effort — a small act, inadequate to the scale of what he was carrying, but the only one I had.
Eventually Andrey broke the tie. Not long after, someone broke into his apartment. A crumpled paper bag by the door. Cookies inside that I told him not to eat. His private journal was taken from his duffle bag. His files on psychotronics — years of research — were gone from his file cabinet. Whether this was connected to Tin or to something else entirely, we did not know. But Andrey's paranoia, already fragile without his medications, became total.
He destroyed his laptop. He destroyed his TV. He shredded his life's work — three shredders he wore out and had to return to the local Target before finishing the job. He believed his apartment was bugged. He believed he could not trust anyone. When I saw him outside his building shortly after, he would not let me in. He said, "Tin is the devil." He said he could not trust anyone. Not even me.
That was the beginning of the chronic homelessness.
From Chicago, mostly through the Uptown area, and then — after an incident that Andrey later told me he considered consensual, though it arrived in a period of profound instability — he fled. He walked. Off Route 40 from Memphis, Tennessee, across three and a half months, to California. Mostly on foot.
He was on his way to Area 51.
This requires some explanation, because it is easy to hear and immediately locate it in a category — delusion, symptom, something to be managed — and miss what was actually happening. Andrey had constructed, through years of reading and thinking and watching the world, a framework in which the things that were happening to him made sense. The voices, the surveillance, the feeling of being targeted: these fit into a coherent picture if you accepted that psychotronic technology was real and that Andrey was one of its targets. Area 51 was where this technology lived. It was, within his framework, the logical destination.
I am not saying his framework was correct. I am saying it was not random. It was the product of an unusually rigorous mind trying to make sense of an experience that had no other available explanation. And I am saying that dismissing it entirely — as so many people around him did — was itself a kind of violence.
A police officer in Brownsville, Tennessee, pulled over to check on him. She bought him a Powerade and a sandwich. He told her he'd had a Pop-Tart that morning in Jackson. She asked her supervisor if there was any way to hold him. He was lucid enough that there was not.
I spent hours trying to find a contact for Area 51 security. I filed a FOIA request with the CIA asking for a statement that Andrey's life would be secured. I called a lieutenant of the Nevada State Police, who issued a statewide alert from Lincoln County and promised they would get him into treatment at a hospital in Las Vegas. I got the word out on the tri-city ham radio network. I sent public service announcements to every local radio station I could find.
What I could not do was reach him. What I could not do was fix the two-year Medicaid-to-Medicare gap that had left him without a therapist at precisely the moment he needed one most. He had told me, in the months before the relapse, how much he needed to talk to someone. We had gone together to meet with an alderman who was also a certified therapist. We arrived an hour early, thinking we were on time. Andrey grew impatient. We went to the beach instead. A few weeks later, he had the episode that changed everything.
That Medicare gap is not an abstraction. In Andrey's case, it was the difference between a life and a life derailed.
This is the part that is harder to write, because it does not fit neatly into the categories available for it.
Andrey and I loved each other. That is the simplest way to say it, and also the most accurate. The nature of that love was complex — as most real love is — and neither of us ever arrived at a clean resolution of what exactly it was or what exactly it could become.
He told me once, in the local thrift store, looking at dresses near the checkout, that he would probably have sex with me if I dressed in one. He said it the way he said most things — fast, sideways, like he was testing whether the idea would break the air between us. It did not. He came back to it, in different forms, over the years. In May of 2016, when he was in a moment of relative stability, we shared a meal outside the Jewel grocery store and he extended his pinky while drinking soda — a small gesture, loaded with the connotation he intended — and looked at me with the question he had never quite been able to ask directly.
I understood what he was doing. And I understood what made it complicated: that Andrey's first love — the one he wrote about in his work, the one his father said he never got over — had been a woman. That the loss of that relationship had left something in him that could not be easily replaced, and that his sexuality was something he was only beginning to learn to hold without shame. He had told me once that same-sex intimacy felt unnatural to him because the purpose of sex was reproduction. I said: what about sexual celebration for the joy of time spent together? He went quiet for a long time.
There was a night in November of 2015 when he was struggling badly with his voices. He was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. He asked me to hold his hand while he told me what he was hearing. I held it. For over two hours I did not speak, did not offer interpretation, did not try to fix what was happening — I only held on, and gripped tighter when he gripped tighter, and let him know through the simple fact of my hand in his that I was not going anywhere. I learned later that if you speak during those moments you become part of the voices. So I stayed quiet. The hold was the whole message: I am here. I am not leaving.
I did not act on whatever was between us. There were moments when I could have. There were moments when he was under the influence of things that lowered his inhibitions and moved him toward me, and each time I understood that to act in those moments would be to exploit what I was supposed to protect. I cared too much for what he was. I cared too much for what we had. And then I reflect upon some of those moments wondering if my guard to protect actually did him harm.
On his way toward California, in early February 2017, Andrey sent me a message. He told me he wanted to spend his life with me.
I do not know how to hold a message like that without it changing something in you permanently. I hold it still.
In March of 2017, concerned about a Facebook post Andrey had made that suggested suicidal thinking, I traveled to Los Angeles with a friend named Mike — and I involved Andrey's family in financing the trip. That was a mistake. Andrey had reached out to me specifically. He had asked for me. And I had responded by making it bigger, more organized, more official — by bringing in the people he was most conflicted about, by turning what should have been an intimate arrival into something that felt, to him, like an intervention.
When the paramedics were called to the library where he had been spending time, the librarian turned them away without context. When the police arrived, they handcuffed Andrey for an hour until we got there. He did meet marginal criteria for mandatory treatment and that few through a few marks. And when it was over, he told the police we had been sent to kill him. He would not accept anything from me — not food, not closeness, nothing. He accepted a sandwich from the officers. He would not look at me.
Police let him go. We were told not to follow.
Two weeks before that trip, in our last real communication, he had told me he had not eaten in three days and that he wanted to spend his life with me. And my response — my well-intentioned, frightened, deeply imperfect response — was to come to him with his family in tow; what resulted in with police involvement, with the full institutional apparatus of concern. What he had asked for was simpler. What he had asked for was me.
March 23rd, 2017 was the last time anyone saw or heard from Andrey at his usual places. He blocked everyone — family, friends, people who loved him — from his social media. He stopped using the phone that had been given to him.
I wrote him one last note, knowing he might never read it:
Speedy, if you are reading this — I sometimes read too much into what you say or write rather than see it for what it is. I am sorry. My worry consumes me. Know that I am moving to California. I am moving without your family's help. If at very least I can let them know you are ok, I am good — not involving them further unless your mind somehow changes.
I dissolved my commitments in Chicago — the radio show, the church responsibilities, the community meetings, the local organizations I had spent years building — and set intention to moved west.
I wrote that the soul mate complex, when disrupted, does not end the soul path — it recalibrates. The Universe sets another encounter in motion. And Andrey, in his final work, took that idea and made it his own — expanded it, grounded it in his framework of nodes and consciousness and light, and sent it back to me transformed. He wrote about the cancer of ignoring crossed paths, about how it eats you from the inside until self-realization arrives, or until some new mutual actualization saves you.
I believe he first wrote that about his first love. I believe, by the end, he had come to write it about us.
What went astray between us was not a failure of love. It was a failure of the structures around the love — the mental healthcare system that left him without a therapist for years, the manipulative influence that isolated him, the well-meaning people who tried to help in ways that felt like control, the illness itself that turned every gesture of love into a possible threat. It was the Love-Loss System in its most devastating form: the thing you need most, placed behind a wall, with the toll collected in pieces of your trust until there is nothing left to pay with.
He needed consistent, quiet, unconditional presence. What he got was the world's best attempts — including mine — made clumsy by fear, by systems not built for his kind of need, by the gap between what love intends and what it is able to deliver when it has no infrastructure to lean on.
I sit with that. I will sit with it for the rest of my life.
But I also believe what he believed: that the universe does not waste nodes. That a path crossing of the depth we had does not simply dissolve when the people involved are separated by circumstance or illness or the grinding weight of a system that was not built for them. That what we built together in years of conversation and shared meals and hand-holding through voices in the dark is not erased. It is part of the structure now. It is in the work.
The light he carried is still in the work.
The work itself — what Andrey built in philosophy and what I wrote in response — is preserved in the companion volume, The Universal of One True Free Eternal Love, with The Quest for Soul-Mate and Universal Law (by Andrey Price with Jason Page). That book contains his ten-chapter philosophical text, my responding essay, and a reflection on what the two of us made together without knowing we were making it. This book is the story of the people. That book is what those people built.