The Man in Grey (What Went Down at Facebook)
In one universe, a version of the Man in Grey was connected to mysterious eldritch occurrences which plagued Facebook HQ for over a year leading up to its infamous October 4th, 2021 blackout, and which were seemingly connected to a deal between Mark Zuckerberg and entity called Chuckzikkiushki, also involving a mysterious black mould growing in the server room. This Man in Grey was never seen directly, but at their funeral service, a Facebook employee who had died as a result of the strange events briefly came back to life just to babble about how “the Man in Grey doesn't care about our troubles”. Later, when an intern went into the server room to investigate mysterious chanting which could be heard emanating from there, they exited “wearing grey robes”. The Man in Grey may, or may not, also have been the humanoid figure glimpsed by several employees instead of their own reflection within the liquid mercury which replaced the water in the water-cooler on September 16th, 2021. (PROSE: What Went Down at Facebook) A member of the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles would later suggest that the 925th Universe's Man in Grey had involuntarily subsumed this version's backstory at some point, citing “whatever grey-robed busybody worked at Facebook all those years ago…” as one of the individuals whose identities he had absorbed. (PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol)
Behind the scenes
The Man in Grey and the Man in Black were both devised by Callum Phillpott in loose reference to the 1980 song Man at C&A, whose fairly mysterious lyrics identify singer Terry Hall's character as “the Man in Grey”, seemingly distinct from “the Man in Black”, with both of them being knowledgeable but powerless figures in the context of the Cold War abruptly erupting into a nuclear World War Three.
| Warning, warning, nuclear attack! Atomic sounds designed to blow your mind! World War Three! Nuclear, nuclear attack! (…) The Man in Black, he told me the latest Moscow news about the storm across the red sea. They drove their ball-point views. I'm the Man in Grey, I'm just the Man at C&A, And I don't have a say in the war games that they play. |
| —Man at C&A |
The first incarnation of the character to make its way to released media was the Man in Black, who appeared in Phillpott's novel Cyber-Hunt, set in the Doctor Who universe. Adapted from the earlier audioplay of the same name, which featured no such figure, the book depicted “the man in black” (then uncapitalised) as a highly mysterious figure with whom Fred makes a deal. Various possible identities for the man in black were proposed or hinted at, including some version of the Doctor's nemesis the Master, the Time Lord messenger seen in the Doctor Who episode Genesis of the Daleks, Death, or Nyarlathotep.
A month after Cyber-Hunt was released, Phillpott published a short narrative Twitter thread, later collected as What Went Down at Facebook, satirising the then-current Facebook blackout. T
As stated by Callum Phillpott on the Jenny Everywhere Discord on July 8th, 2023:
| The Man in Grey definitely got tweaked a bit conceptually after [What Went Down at Facebook (short story)], but he's been around for a while — in fact he might predate the Man in Black since a similar figure did pop up in an abandoned draft of a novella I was writing, but I can't remember which name I chose then. The story never got far (so it's entirely possible the Man in Black/Grey never left my loose story notes), but the story itself was a sort of romcom riff on Beyond the Wall of Sleep, with the Man in Whatever acting as a cold and removed eldritch matchmaker who was heavily implied or stated to be Nyarlathotep. This story was doomed to fail. This did nearly make it in to Minalopa as a subplot, but we all know what happened there. (…) It's probably a safe call to treat [What Went Down at Facebook] as a different universe. (Also, the reason it's a 50/50 chance of either being the Man in Grey or Man in Black is because I got both of these names from the Specials song Man at C&A — obviously they're quite generic names that have been used centuries prior, but that's where I got them from. |
| —Callum Phillpott |
The Man in PROSE: What Went Down at Facebook would go on to be referenced in PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol as “whatever grey-robed busybody worked at Facebook all those years ago…”, suggested to have been an initially-distinct individual whose identity the 925th Universe's Man in Grey had subsumed, as part of a wider claim that the Man in Grey had a tendency to subsume other people's pasts into his own, although the Man at C&A Men were not specifically referenced.
| Incarnations of the Man in Grey |
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| What Went Down at Facebook • 925th Universe • Universe 925-B • 775th Universe |
