It's a bad short story. Whether it was generated at the hands of humans or a computer isn't really relevant. Speaking in riddles is cheap now, so authors better learn how to surprise the reader in simpler, more readable words. It seems to be something that LLMs are quite bad at.

Yeah, I found this extremely unpleasant to read. I wouldn't have pegged it as LLM-assisted, but I would have pegged the author as pretentious and bad at coming up with compelling analogies.