I didn't get anything about a lack of free will from that story -- it's more a reflection of the inevitability of thermodynamics. Their life is driven by a pressure gradient, we're driven by a similar entropy gradient.

There's a story I read a few years ago, I think from Wilson, about the universe as it stretches out in time, hundreds of trillions of years from now, into the heat death of the universe. It's the same concept, thermodynamics, but a different scope.