Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)

already posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162653 which is itself a dupe but that was the first one posted today

Flagged as a dupe. This was already posted earlier today.

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162653

A warning about the linked copy: this isn't the standard text of Bradbury's story. I compared it with three other circulating copies and this version is only about 1,016 words versus ~2100. Notable omissions:

- the opening description of the empty house and the clock repeating into the silence

- almost the entire passage about the house's paranoid defenses, including its reactions to animals

- the dog searching the room for its owners, the pancake smell that attracts it, and the cleaning machines disposing of the body

- most of the nursery sequence, the artificial meadow, insects, animals, sounds, smells, jungle rain, receding landscape

- the cigar, warmed beds, much of the house's evening routine

- the fire consuming the Picassos and Matisses

- most of the extended description of the house dying

- much of the final image of dawn, rubble, etc

Worse, some passages are crudely compressed rather than deleted, e.g. the elaborate breakfast disposal, the chemical firefighting robots description.

Anyone encountering the story through this post should find another copy. This one appears to be an unlabelled, severely abridged, and rather badly corrupted version.