Story identifierad: Det kommer att bli mjuka anmärkningar av Ray Bradbury
The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work. At first, it is not apparent that anything is wrong, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present, and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a woman, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon.
– Plot summary from Wikipedia
Bekräftad av innehållet i insamlingen av noveller som finns i "Ytterligare information" en del av frågan, verkar de matcha innehållet i Stories of Ourselves: University of Cambridge International Examinations Anthology of Stories på engelska (Cambridge Learning) , som innehåller följande noveller (bland många andra):
- The Signalman, by Charles Dickens
- The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- How It Happened, by Arthur Conan Doyle
- There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury
- Meteor, by John Wyndham
- The Lemon Orchard, by Alex la Guma
- Secrets, by Bernard MacLaverty
- The Taste of Watermelon, by Borden Deal
- The Third and Final Continent, by Jhumpa Lahiri
- On Her Knees, by Tim Winton