Just finished. I got the answer to my questions from last time - those characters did have important roles to play in the story he wanted to tell. They do still feel kind of forced in in order to serve their purposes, but the purposes were interesting, so I'm happy to accept. I really liked the twist of the autoverse's logic starting to overtake the simulation - and the irony of them refusing to accept their creation and therefore rewriting it. Some clever references to concepts I learned in the _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the battle of explanatory power between theories... It did remind me of Delaney in the end - lots of really fun mind-expanding ideas kind of crunched together and sometimes rushed.