Fahrenheit 451

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.