Today is August 4, 2026

[Crossposted from AI StopWatch]

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.

So begins Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, a short story that has haunted me for most of my life. Depicting the aftermath of nuclear war, it was first published in 1950. It takes place today.

Literally:

“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three more times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”

Was it narrative convenience or prophetic vision that drove Bradbury to depict the smart house of the future as gratuitously conspicuous in its competence, pointlessly reminding the owners of the year and their city of residence? There’s something very Alexa-like about that — and about the janky brittleness evident in the system as it prepares breakfast for a family that won’t be eating and opens the garage door for a father who won’t be going to work. In my head canon, Allendale isn’t actually the home’s location, but the city associated with its IP address.

Bradbury seems to know you want there to be characters in this story. The house is there to serve! But at the same time, Bradbury takes pains to make sure you understand that there is no there there. The house is going through the motions of a nurturing spirit: a tireless butler and nanny rolled into one. But it’s all clicking relays and memory tapes, going through the motions despite a traumatic change in context.

Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

The dark and disturbing beauty of this story is in how the family is present in its absence, in the shape of the activities the home performs around it over the course of a day. The profiles — the kids’ four-thirty virtual safari, the father’s eight o’clock cigar, the mother’s nine-thirty poem — form silhouettes akin to those on the west wall of the house:

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted window panes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned, evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint — the man, the woman, the children, the ball — remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

This reveal isn’t even a spoiler. It’s given on page 2 of 5. The way the story keeps going anyway is the whole point. The world can go on without us, it says, and so can our machines.

The title is shared with a 1918 poem by Sara Teasdale, which the house describes as the mother’s favorite and recites in full:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I grew up in the final phases of the Cold War. Horrified and fascinated by nuclear weapons, as a child I had a recurring nightmare of an impossibly bright flash of light giving birth to a mushroom cloud. That was the entire dream, really — that and an overpowering impression that all was at an end, that our continued existence had never been guaranteed, that we were very much allowed to wipe ourselves out.

When as an English teacher I would read this story with my 10th grade students every year, I would sometimes mist up at the end, as I’m doing right now. I did it anyway. We need to remember.

Tomorrow still happens, but it can happen without us. The story’s concluding visual is of the smoldering rubble left where the home finally fell to fire during the night:

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is...”