"The future was not what it used to be."

“It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others.”

““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.”

“It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought.”

“He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away.”

“You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question.”

“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.”