To me this short story doesn't seem that mind-bending or provocative. Doesn't everything hinge on the premise that you can send information back in time? Essentially this seems to be a simplified presentation of Newcomb's paradox [1], or perhaps some other temporal paradox.
The present story simply proposes a straight-forward way out of any such paradox, namely that there isn't any free will at all, hence there's no way to alter the future. However, since as far as we know there's no way to send information back in time, this doesn't actually say much about the real world or the actual existence of free will.
The present story simply proposes a straight-forward way out of any such paradox, namely that there isn't any free will at all, hence there's no way to alter the future. However, since as far as we know there's no way to send information back in time, this doesn't actually say much about the real world or the actual existence of free will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox