San Francisco; Soon to be Killer Robot Dystopia?

1953

FAHRENHEIT 451
by Ray Bradbury
This one, with gratitude, is for DON CONGDON.
FAHRENHEIT 451:
The temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming,
gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light
of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window,
touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast.
Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils

of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-
padded paws.

Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city and the clouds had cleared away
completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to bend down and look at the Hound. It was like
a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity
and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out
of itself.
"Hello," whispered Montag, fascinated as always with the dead beast, the living beast.
At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set
the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse
area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway,
and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned
loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the
areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the
proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then
tossed in the incinerator. A new game began.

That was supposed to happen in Detroit, under OCP..