I built this as an interactive story about the Intelligence Community’s 1993–1995 MDDS program—an unclassified effort to fund research into petabyte-scale data systems. It turns out that Sergey Brin’s early work at Stanford was directly funded by this initiative, alongside the public Stanford Digital Library Project. This page explores how those “Massive Digital Data Systems” became the blueprint for Google—and for surveillance-scale data infrastructure. All sources are documented in the companion PDF, but this version focuses on interactive storytelling. Would love to hear thoughts.