Lie down on your bed. Now close your eyes and in the inky void which appears, take your entire existence and go search out whatever you can conceive of. Characters; animals you've met; plants that impress, and actions like running, swimming and flying. Search for feelings, adventures and great yearnings. Within the dark you will come to see. This is how to enter other worlds.

A pitter patter of concussion rains from above, falling from vast clouds of weaponry. Sun-like fireballs and fissures of light and dark rend sky like lightning.

"Not very good, is it?" The man put the question to the woman beside him with a turn of his head. It's so inane she wants to reply along the lines of 'nice weather for the ducks.' Instead she walks further into the pod's room and begins stretching within the semicircle of control consoles. Bits of metal and human paint the cramped walls, and among the corpses she makes slow and fast, complex movements. Quelk, for that was his name, shivered his metal skin and left Allia alone in the Intendant Pod.

At last. Her movements slowed a little as he disappeared back into the ship; it was always a relief to be apart from the awkward. Not only that, his departure gave her the space she needed to reflect–this need was a great weakness of her, but here again she indulged it: this ship, whose name Allia did not even know, was vaguely unsettling in its primitivity. The use of space was sinister, layout of information unrefined. Looking through the walls–into the structure of the place–the architecture could only be called crude. This uninspired design made her self-conscious and she felt grateful for her own well-made body. Compared to this hunk of junk, I am a real human. Her movements grew stronger, a new layer of complexity glimmered for a moment before fading. Now faster, fast until a coordinated blur and sonic booms were sounding off her body. Now slower, slower until the whole body moved imperceptibly slow but smoothly and without the faintest waver.

Allia ran through the corridors, too quickly because she kept veering onto the sides of the walls. Quelk was waiting, turning a human helmet in his hand when she crashed into the wall behind him and picked herself out of it, laughing. Allia thought the wall drastically improved by the crumples and rips she had given it. No longer a flat grey sheet. Quelk dropped his helmet and quietly turned to face her. He was always brooding, and Allia didn't care to know, to try and share his mind. I don't want to ruin what I have. Indeed, she was at home in her mind and painfully aware of how rare that was.

"Quelk, we'll make our way to the starships?" Her voice filled what she found to be an oppressive silence. Perhaps Quelk had needed his inane comments for the same void.

"This is how." He sparsely replied, extending his hand. We must be nervous, she finally realized as she took the hand. Zettabytes of information instantaneously flew between them, vast piles of information from the Ume. Quelk was the communications operator between them, and just now Allia realized with a glow that the Ume had contacted Quelk and been in constant communication with them for over half an hour. What an honor! Although humanity proper claimed the Ume as their lineage, as a Martian she felt a kind of parental ownership over them too. A smile settled in and a little bit of awe tinged her heart as she tried to follow their hearts. A new message came through his hand. Hello, Allia. Vast branches of thought raveled behind the words, shaking her mind.

Hello. She replied with a glow. We will destroy our ancestors. She sent her feeble sentiments to this Ume, pitifully embarrassing as they were. The Ume immediately assured her otherwise. But Allia was familiar with the arguments, and at some point you just couldn't call a valley a mountain.

The enforcement of multilateralism, this is the ecology of sentience. You are not intimate with nature but will now know death is natural. The rhetoric was familiar, but the sensations, thought patterns which came alongside were not. Current in the sky, small force of nature, spell a desolating disease. Allia nodded. Then the Ume added a final word for her, and it struck her soul deeply. Mother. Together, the two Martians cried out keening and embraced. The nanomachines within them swirled, metals whorled strange patterns of the red planet.

"Arzak alum, kæncāstag carrah!" The Martians exited to the top of the ship wearing halos of joy, and with longs wings instead of arms. Using the strangeness-state plasma that coursed through them in times like these, the Martians shot into the air looking more bird then human, now more spacecraft then bird. Their nanomachines shimmered and contoured and the two alit on the field of warfare.

Towards space. The air was thin and lift surfaces counted for little seventy thousand feet up. The air pressure was reminiscent of Mars. Allia hurtled through the hull of a human subspacecraft, accelerating twenty two gees like a rocket to intercept the thing, breaking it's field defense system in the fraction of a second with plasmodynamic martial arts. Her nanomachines blurred. Humans will always be disadvantaged. She spiraled through flesh and across the subspacecraft, a streak of death. No other species has ever refused to evolve. She dealt with particle-based traps in slow, methodical strokes across three of the four forces. The naturalistic perspective of the Ume–indeed, of all Earthlings (bar humans, apparently)–was new and exotic to her. We were made to adapt, but there are still good and bad circumstances. Remembrances of the red dust and the hazy sun touched her mind, red rock lighter than the human blood.

Ripping upwards she burst out again and rocketed away from the craft to silence another one, and then another. The curve of the Earth became more pronounced and the sky a deep dark, and she began to feel the radiation excreta of space warfare: only a hundred miles away lay the behemoth battlespace of The Terratic War. Already, swarms of machines rolled across the vast sky. Someday I'll learn how to cry. She didn't know how to create tear ducts nor link them to her mind, but it was a common romance amongst Martians–and one not unobtainable, at that. Allia looked down at the Earth, deep blue pockmarked with momentary reds and shining whites. Meanwhile her nanomachines ate up the human ship and fashioned a Sturmeskulachine, transforming crude design into deep layers.

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It occurs to one that drawing is primarily a sensation: in the same way thought does not follow strict guidelines, drawing is neither a strict matter of rules–the knowledge is tacit, neither fully rational nor emotional. We can 'feel' the process of drawing as we may 'feel' thoughts and concepts without words. It is within this sensorial space that learning occurs. Ah, this is to be the blind speculating upon sight.