Fahrenheit 451 (1984)

The time is not too long from now. The place is New York City. Yet it is a setting few of us would ever recognize. For this is a world where simply owning a book is dangerously illegal. Where Firemen come not to save houses, but to burn them for the books inside. And where you, once a dedicated Fireman, are now a rebel with a passion for books --- and the most wanted fugitive in the country. An Interactive Fiction game based on the book with the same name. Set as a sequel to the book, taking place after the novel ends.

Storyline

You are Guy Montag, fugitive. Once you wore the symbolic number 451. Once you were a Fireman. Your job in life was clearly defined: to protect man from books. Books with their dangerous knowledge, books with their fact that could be twisted and molded and and used to destroy. Your job in life was to seek out and destroy these books, and hence your allegiance was to the Firemen who wore the sign of the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns: 451. Then you met the girl, Clarisse. For her, books were magical things, to be sought out and remembered, not feared. You began to challenge what you had learned from the Firemen and you became... a threat. You watched in horror as the girl and others who loved books were hunted like criminals by The Hounds: mechanical terrors who slept, but did not sleep; who lived, but did not live, in gently humming, gently vibrating silver shells. You rebelled and discovered the Underground: individuals who are tempted by words, seduced by ideas, hungry for learning. Each of them memorized a single book, and kept it in them, the sole repository of its existence. As a war with an unseen enemy raged across America, a war too vague and too violent for you to comprehend, you escaped the Firemen and their Hounds and made your way to... New York. The war ended. With the help of the Underground, you acquired a new face, a new identity. You were still Montag, but no longer Montag. You remained a wanted man. Now you wait, poised for escape, inside Central Park. You have learned of the girl’s survival. She is in New York, awaiting your help in the most daring plan to rescue humankind from its own ignorance and fear. You are about to challenge the Mechanical Hounds, which patrol the streets of post-war Fifth Avenue. You are about to discover the dangers behind the reconstructed facades of one of the world’s most famous streets. You are an instrument of freedom. You must prepare yourself for the inferno: Fahrenheit 451.