Hans Jerimoth was invented in 5238 at a meeting of the Ctjn Empire’s elite Love Junta. Faced with rising civil unrest, the digitized Xafane Consciousness suggested the Empire create its own anti-establishment terror cell to unite public opinion and eliminate problem figures. Jason Ironheart quickly agreed, seeing a black-ops terrorism unit as an important military budget appropriation. It was Genevieve Floyd, however, who recognized the need for the organization’s charismatic figurehead, developing Jerimoth and his Ven’rom’es terrorists to focus-test as both intriguingly exotic yet repulsively foreign.

Over the next twelve years Jerimoth claimed responsibility for dozens of terrorist acts, always over crudely-taped holorecordings and typically during election season. The recordings were made by the Junta itself: Jerimoth’s voice was supplied by a digitally-altered Floyd, while his grotesquely mutilated visage was provided by Ironheart, unrecognizable without his skullplate and faceplugs.

Ven’rom’es was a striking success during this period, galvanizing pro-government sentiment while allowing the state to crack down on various rabblerousers and equallary-rights activists. In 5250 the Junta decided to retire the Ven’rom’es concept, announcing that Jerimoth himself had been killed in a standoff with government agents, raising the government’s approval rating to record numbers until an unexpected message from Jerimoth claimed responsibility for the graviton bomb about to destroy a fifth of Byforalla.

After some internal squabbling over the origin of the new Jerimoth tapes, the Junta made a halfhearted attempt to track down their rogue fictional creation and his defiantly material new followers, but found the process logistically and ontologically confusing. By 5302 the last member of the Love Junta had been dismantled and the Empire itself lay crumbling in the hands of regicide-king Murder the First, but Hans Jerimoth and Ven’rom’es lived on in ubiquitous videotape.

—Recorder 3000-21