They Don’t Change Who You Are. They Change Who the City Thinks You Are.
The Mirror Syndicates are decentralized identity-broker networks specializing in persona construction, reputation laundering, and social erasure.
They do not forge documents in the traditional sense.
They rewrite social reality.
If the City believes you are someone else, functionally—you are.
The Syndicates exist in the gray space between legality, necessity, and existential threat. Refugees, politicians, criminals, whistleblowers, and victims of systemic failure all end up at a mirror eventually.
Some walk away reborn.
Some vanish completely.
The Mirror Syndicates arose from a flaw in the City’s foundational promise.
Commonwealth City guarantees survival—but not forgiveness.
Reputation persists.
Data remembers.
Mistakes become permanent.
Early Syndicate founders were former archivists, social engineers, Pulse Union technicians, and data fugitives who realized that in a fully recorded society, identity itself had become infrastructure.
They didn’t break the system.
They exploited how belief propagates.
The Mirror Syndicates are cell-based, paranoid, and deliberately fragmented.
No central authority
Independent mirror cells with unique methods
Compartmentalized client knowledge
Burn-after-use operational protocols
Cells specialize in different services:
Reputation laundering
Persona replacement
Social death and rebirth
Narrative inoculation
Controlled exposure management
Never confirm a client’s past
Plausibility matters more than truth
The City’s belief is the product
If you hesitate, you fail
A good mirror leaves no fingerprints.
The Syndicates don’t coerce.
They alter reference chains.
Re-seeding social networks
Redirecting citation authority
Adjusting algorithmic assumptions
Engineering “organic” encounters
They don’t erase records.
They drown them.
Once the City stops referencing your old self, that self effectively ceases to exist.
To most citizens, the Mirror Syndicates are an urban myth.
To those who need them, they are terrifyingly real.
Public opinion, when it surfaces, is polarized:
Lifesavers for the persecuted
Tools for criminals to escape consequence
A moral hazard the City refuses to confront
Officials publicly deny their influence.
Privately, many have used them.
The Pulse Union: Overlapping territory. Visibility can create or destroy identities.
The Patrons: Deep mutual contempt. Permanence versus reinvention.
The Continuity Forum: Philosophical enemies. Memory versus malleability.
Assembly Secretariat: Procedural nightmares. Identities that technically comply but feel wrong.
The Open Ledger: Occasional collaboration. Paperwork still matters.
Players encounter the Mirror Syndicates when identity becomes the battlefield.
A client who no longer remembers who they were
A mirror job that goes wrong and resurfaces an old identity
Exposing a Syndicate cell manipulating public trust
Deciding whether someone deserves erasure
A mirror constructed to frame someone else
Players may:
Acquire new identities
Hunt a vanished person
Protect a reborn client
Unravel layered social lies
Mirror Syndicates respect precision and discretion.
They fear moral certainty.
The Syndicates are ethically fractured.
Liberators believe identity should be fluid and forgivable
Operators see identity as a commodity
Extremists believe permanent erasure is mercy
Cells that draw too much attention are dismantled.
By rivals.
By clients.
By themselves.
The Mirror Syndicates expose a dangerous truth:
In a City that remembers everything, being forgiven is a privilege.
They do not promise redemption.
They offer escape.
And in doing so, they ask the question the City avoids:
If no one owns your life—
who owns your name?