The History

We began meeting in a converted warehouse. We had no name and no building of our own. By winter we passed a hundred.

The Atomic Songbirds recorded inside our sanctuary. We were barely a year old, and almost nobody heard the recording at the time.

We took our 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 returned to the warehouse and recorded a second time. The two recordings share one room and one congregation: ours.

Frank Evans died, and what he was persisted in a vessel. We keep the day.

We opened a chapel on Luna, our first congregation off the Earth. The hymns carried better in the corridors.

For our first eleven years we numbered in the low hundreds. After 1965 we grew past twelve thousand.

We sent a mission toward Mars while Mars was still being prepared: four people and a portable organ. The organ arrived damaged, and our first Martian congregation formed around the rebuilding, years before the landing.

Cathedrals stood on every major colony, as the plan we published in 1999 said they would. Our warehouse still leaked, and was still swept.

The recordings of The Atomic Songbirds were banned worldwide. Among them were the two songs recorded in our sanctuary.