Not exactly. The story follows an imagined genus and the species within it across deep time. As the lineage evolves, different species emerge, while humanity evolves alongside them.

The fictional genus, Aquaeromorpha, gives the story a framework for exploring how a relationship between humans and another species might change over thousands—or even millions—of years.

The science is imagined. The human behaviours are not.

Throughout the story, humans continually redefine the species according to their own needs and beliefs.

At different points, the species becomes food, deity, prey, an object of knowledge, labour, entertainment, biological material, pet, adornment and genetic substrate.

Each interpretation may seem understandable within its historical context. But each also gives humans permission to do something to the species.

The question is not simply whether humans are cruel.

It is whether the act of defining another living being also gives us the power to control it.

No. Humanity is not presented as simply good or bad.

Humans are curious. We are inventive. We seek knowledge. We create beauty. We experience empathy. We build relationships with other species. We try to survive and eventually dream of overcoming mortality itself.

But those same qualities can become tools of domination.

Curiosity can become control.
Empathy can become possession.
Ingenuity can become exploitation.
Reverence can become another form of control.

Songs of the Species explores these contradictions rather than offering a simple judgment about humanity.

That tension is intentional.

For much of the story, we see the species through human eyes. Humans name it, classify it, worship it, eat it, harness it, study it, entertain themselves with it and eventually incorporate it into their own bodies.

The species is continually being given identities by others.

But it has its own existence beyond those identities.

The question becomes: What happens when we stop asking what another being is for, and begin asking what it wants?

Autonomy is the ability to exist and make choices without having those choices determined by someone else.

The species is rarely granted that freedom.

Even when humans appear to care for it, they often retain ownership. Even when they admire it, they may alter its body. Even when they study it, they may experiment upon it.

The species can be valued and violated at the same time.

This is perhaps most clearly expressed in the Fashionista's living adornments: the species is “glorified and imprisoned in the same gesture.”

Science is not a villain of the story.

The Scientist represents humanity's extraordinary capacity to observe, understand and manipulate the living world. The problem arises when the ability to do something becomes confused with the right to do it.

The species' adaptability is described as “promising.” But promising for whom?

The research team follows established ethical standards—and awards themselves a Gold Star.

The humour is deliberate. Ethical procedures can be important and necessary, but following a system of rules does not automatically answer the deeper ethical question:

Should we do this at all?

This is one of the story's more complicated encounters.

The juvenile treats the species as a pet and briefly experiences something like empathy—a recognition of kinship.

For a moment, the boundary between human and other dissolves.

Then the interest fades.

The game ends.

The scene asks whether empathy has meaning if it lasts only as long as our attention does. It also questions the contradiction between loving another being and believing that we have the right to own it.

The Fashionista takes an existing human impulse—our desire to decorate, beautify and transform the body—and pushes it into speculative territory.

Living members of the species become ornamental augmentation.

They are admired precisely because they are alive.

Yet their beauty depends upon their confinement.

This is another expression of the show's recurring paradox: something can be treasured and exploited simultaneously.

The Collective represents a different kind of relationship.

Humanity no longer simply controls the species from the outside. It incorporates the species into its own biology and consciousness.

Is this exploitation?

Is it symbiosis?

Is it assimilation?

Or is it the beginning of something neither species could have become alone?

The story doesn't provide a definitive answer. Instead, it asks us to consider whether merging with another being necessarily means understanding it—or whether we can simply find new ways to possess it.

After everything humanity has done to the species, the final act is not conquest.

It is abandonment.

Humanity sheds its physical bodies and uploads itself into a digitally networked promise of immortality. The species is simply left behind.

This is significant because the species is no longer useful to humanity.

And perhaps that is the ultimate test of our relationship with another living being:

Can we value something that no longer serves us?

For most of the story, we hear humanity talking about the species.

We hear what humans believe it is:

Food.
Deity.
Muse.
Entertainment.
Adornment.
Genetic substrate.

But these are all human interpretations.

At the end, the species' song awakens.

For the first time, we are invited to imagine the species not as something humans have named or defined, but as a being with its own memory, its own history and its own voice.

The ending does not tell us what that song means.

It asks us to listen.

Yes—and also not only about animals.

The imagined species provides a way to look at humanity's relationship with the more-than-human world, but the underlying questions can extend to any being whose autonomy is defined by someone else.

Who gets to define another being's identity?

Who decides what another being is worth?

When does care become control?

And can we recognize kinship without needing to possess what we recognize?

A song carries memory.

It can travel through generations without remaining exactly the same. It can be changed, forgotten, rediscovered and reinterpreted.

The species' song is therefore more than a literal sound. It is a metaphor for memory, inheritance and the traces that one living being leaves in another.

Humanity has left its echoes in the species.

The question at the end is whether those echoes will determine the future—or whether the species will make its own song.

There is still a bit of time.