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A man who looked similar to the Man in Grey but wore darker robes was once active in the same universe as a bald man wearing a floral-print shirt who sometimes went by the name “Fred”.
The Man in Grey was aware of his relationship to this man, but was keen to suppress it. Doctor Know compared it to his own similarity to “the time-traveller guy”. The Man in Grey was keen to keep it a secret from the Great Higher-Ups, and Doctor Know blackmailed him into giving Know a job at the Multidimensional Finders Service by showing him photographs of the man in the dark robes, (PROSE: Open Sourcing) also threatening to tell the Higher-Ups about the Man's involvement in “the War—”. (PROSE: Open Sourcing (2024 reedit))
As he later confessed to Professor Wogglebug, the Man in Grey had difficulty recalling his earlier existence, openly wondering: “I swear my robes were a lot darker than this… when did they even become grey?”. As a result he was unsure of what his real name was, or his original species. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff) He seemed to have some residual awareness of having had other bodies before his current one, once ruminating that “in many ways, this form was severely limiting, but it was the one he had”. (PROSE: Open Sourcing (2024 reedit))
Behind the scenes
The “darker man in grey” is strongly implied to be the Man in Black featured in Callum Phillpott's own earlier novel, Cyber-Hunt, set in the Doctor Who universe to whom the Man in Grey was indeed suspiciously similar. Unlike the Man in Grey, his DWU equivalent was not an open-source character. See here for more information on the development of the two characters.
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