The great majority of them came back a week later, complaining that it was all Spider’s fault. Yes, he thought, it was his fault. It was his fault fo… - K. A. Bedford

The thing Spider hated about time machines was that people got them, thinking they could fix everything that had gone wrong in their lives. Thinking they could go back and make amends for things they wished they’d not done. Thinking they could save loved ones from terrible fates, or magically improve their love lives. Too many people thought of time machines as magical “Get out of Personal Responsibility Free” devices. In times past, if you did something rotten, or hurt someone you loved, or didn’t do so well with the ladies, you tried to learn from it, and maybe become a better person in the future. Now people who’d done those sorts of things—and worse—simply figured, Oh well, I’ll jump in my time machine, and fix it. Which was fine, but in ninety-eight percent of such cases, time machine operators succeeded only in making their situations worse.

So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?" Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable.
"We don't know. We just don't know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far."
"Right," Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. "And when you say 'we' and 'us', what you really mean is 'you', yes?"
"They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.

“But that...” Spider paused, “is a fine piece of movie magic.” From a time when movies were magic, the last days of the old Hollywood studio system. These days if a film called for a prop like that, it would most likely be rendered digitally; if it had to exist in the real world at all, it could be whomped up in a 3D printer, sintered from various powders, fused together with lasers—and utterly disposable, like most of the films that came along these days. Nobody would preserve such a thing; nobody would see the point in keeping and restoring such props. It was a sad thing, at least for people Spider’s age, who remembered better times.