The 'something' presumably being these other-side-of-singularity entities you've mentioned before of emptiness and information devouring that are examining these simulations of real people in some form of destructive testing.
The Emperor, understandably, finds this distressing.

Eerie stuff!

What I am reading suggests that the Emperor, or a thing that resembles his thought-echo embedded in the surface of the naked singularity, is taking similar imprints of his 'future' subjects, recorded by the Oracles into the singularities they fell into, and 'feeding' them to something.

Just finished doing some stuff with the code that takes me... right back where I started. The dialogue with the new engine works the same as before! Yay!

(Soon, CHOICES, because something something Meaningful Choices)

Utterly unmanageable.

This happened to me and they're barely ten feet tall.

Like how, perhaps, there was infinite potential ways it could go, back when you didn't know how it was going to end.

Maybe it felt like it was one thing, then became another thing instead as you put the pieces together, but you can remember what both versions of this felt like?

Bonus.