Ray Bradbury Set "There Will Come Soft Rains" on Today's Date

Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set on August 4, 2026 — the date arrived this week. The story follows an automated house that goes on cooking meals and reading poetry to a family incinerated in a nuclear flash, and it has aged into an unnervingly precise parable about machines that keep performing service long after the people they served are gone.