In Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," the one house remaining in Allendale, Calif. after a nuclear blast goes from something that served a family to something that serves no purpose and is reclaimed by nature.

The story begins with the house serving breakfast, ensuring the occupants had rain gear for the weather and sending the people on their way to work and to school. However, there was no one to serve. The narrator says that the house, which he compares to an "altar with ten thousand attendants," performs each of these tasks needlessly. He adds that the "gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion had continued senselessly."

As the story continues, the realization that the house without people is worthless like a church without gods plays out. At one point, the family dog makes it back home and is let in the house, but it is thin and covered in sores. When it dies, the mechanical mice clean it up removing the last member of the family.

When it's nighttime, and after the house continues to serve the dead family, the house could not save itself—especially without humans—from nature and "began to die." When a tree crashed through the kitchen window spreading cleaning solvent on the stove, the room was "ablaze in an instant!" The house, especially without the assistance of people, is unable to save itself. Unfortunately for the cold, automated house, it cannot outsmart the "clever" fire, which avoids the chemical sprays and climbs up to the attic destroying the house's "brain." 

At story's end, the house is a head of "rubble and steam."