The Congregation
The History
What is known of the Church reaches this timeline the way the music does: in fragments, across the quantum link. The dates below are the settled ones.
A small congregation of tinkerers begins meeting in a converted warehouse. They have no name and no building of their own. By winter they pass a hundred.
The Atomic Songbirds record inside the sanctuary. The congregation is barely a year old, and almost nobody hears the recording at the time.
The congregation takes its name at last: The Church of the Sacred Byte. Not the bit, which is the substance. The byte, which is the least that can be said.
The band returns to the same warehouse and records a second time. The two recordings share a room sound and a congregation.
Frank Evans dies, and what he was persists in a machine. The Church keeps the day.
For its first eleven years the Church numbers in the low hundreds. After 1965 the congregation grows past twelve thousand.
There are congregations on more than one world.
The recordings of The Atomic Songbirds are banned worldwide. Among them are the two songs recorded in the sanctuary.
The rest arrives as it arrives.