"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a short story included in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and one of my favorite pieces. Possible spoilers to follow:
It's about a computerized, mechanical house left standing after nuclear war has destroyed the world.
The house provides for a family no longer there, making and discarding meals, playing music, putting on shadow plays for the children on the nursery walls, choosing and reciting a poem for a tired head of household returned from work...all a show for ghosts.
Thinking about it last night, I realized that the melancholy went far beyond any anthropomorphizing the reader might be doing. Once you get beyond that notion (after all, the A.I. of the house isn't sophisticated enough to really feel anything or to even notice the absence of its inhabitants or the destruction of the world), you're left with an artifact that embodies the best of human nature, a machine with a default setting of love. And then you're reminded that the earth is dead and everyone is gone. That too is humanity's handiwork.
The end of the story breaks your heart.
Thankfully, The Martian Chronicles doesn't end there.
If you haven't already, go see what Ray Bradbury wrought.
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