If there had been any survivors, they would have found the situation anticlimactic. And, to be fair, it was not entirely unreasonable to assume, as the late human race had, that the destruction of a planet could not be a subtle event. The nonexistent survivors were at least consoled by the thought that, since there weren't actually any witnesses, they could keep on believing that without fear of anyone contradicting them.

Nevertheless, the overall feeling about what had happened was (hypothetically) disappointment. First of all, there hadn't been any warning at all, and it was very inconvenient to die unexpectedly. Even those who were prepared for the apocalypse were caught off guard: they figured that, even if they didn't know the exact day, it would at least occur at some meaningful time, like 6:06:06, or something like that.

But no, it was a little past two in the afternoon when the Earth blew up. It was a beautiful summer day—at least, in the part of the world where the only one to realize anything was about to happen lived.

Samuel was happily swimming in his bowl when he realized the end was near. It was a sudden flash; he saw the world like a puzzle, with the last few pieces about to fall into place. And then, it would be done, everything swept back into the box. Through the thick glass around him he saw only one thing left out of place. On a wall opposite him was a clock. The people in that house were, and could not help but be, totally ignorant of how it's shape was twisted passing through the water so that only their goldfish, out of all the creatures on Earth could see the terrible truth.

Samuel was distressed. He was a simple goldfish; he did not ask for much from life. He had no interest in politics, and was perfectly happy to leave the government of the oceans to the crabs. He was not wealthy, but he had a bowl to call his own, and that was good enough for him. [i]But who will clean my bowl if everything ends?[/i] he thought (in general, humans and goldfish have much more in common than either would like to believe).

He swam a lap around his home. He wouldn't have many more chances to do that, to feel the water swirling past him, to see his rocks moving below, and his plastic castle, and the shapes of the people outside. Yes, he was going to miss it.

But his bowl was small, and his nostalgic inventory of all the things he was going to miss once he was dead only took about ten seconds. To be fair, that is a decent amount of time to a goldfish. He then spent the next twenty seconds worrying about how he was going to spend the rest of the remaining time.

When the clock hit thirty seconds to the minute he snapped out of it. Samuel couldn't read the numbers (or at all—they don't teach you that in fish college) but he could see well enough that there wasn't much time left.

Just then the door of the room flew open, and one of the humans came lumbering in. It sat down in front of the big black rectangle under the clock. That cheered Samuel up: the world might be ending, but he did like to watch TV. The remote was raised, and, with a flash, the TV turned on as the universe turned off.