Asimov's Science Fiction by Penny Publications

Duyi and I were in the lead, Hatta and another guard following in a second skimmer. We were supposed to be riding the east roadline, but Duyi angled low between the trees and made a sharp turn onto a connector that took us to the northeast line.
    I glanced behind us, apprehensive. "I think we've lost the escort, young master."
    "Excellent!" Duyi proclaimed, as if this were his intended result.
    I recalled how he'd refused to let Hatta ride with us, even though our skimmer was a four-seater. Maybe he
had
planned this from the start. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a black hole.
    We raced at top speed over an open field, then decelerated to squeeze into another copse of trees. Somewhere deep in the mottled shade, Duyi slowed the skimmer to a hover, lowered it down to the ground, and cut the antigrav. We dropped the last few centimeters to land with a thunk on the roadline ridge.
    "Come on!" Duyi said, climbing out of the skimmer, and I had no choice but to follow him.
    We scrambled down the ridge, over a fallen tree trunk, and through the soft knee-high ferns that filled the understory. Duyi led us straight to a rock outcropping, as if he had a map loaded in his NeuroLogic. As I came up behind him, I realized my initial thought was wrong: he wasn't following a map, he was following the feel of a symrock vein, the way a bird feels magnetic north.
    Where the vein was exposed, the symrock looked a sort of milky blue color, near translucent, reminding me of a vid Duyi had watched about the arctic ice caves. But the symrock felt warm to the touch, its freshly chipped edges sharp as glass, and of course there was the not-so-small matter of what it could do.
    What I knew of symrock I knew only from overhearing Duyi's studies. It was formed from sedimentary deposits of biotic origin. Moseroth had a native species of microorganism that grew symbiotically inside living animals and degraded their corpses when they died, and the resultant deposits could become lithified into symrock. Why the symbionts produced the necessary conditions for macroscopic quantum entanglement was still a matter of scholarly debate. Before that day, symrock had been a theoretical concept like gravity or evolution. Not something real, something I could touch.
    Duyi placed his hand against the symrock vein and closed his eyes. I had no idea what to expect—only the Regency family had the correct genetic markers for supporting the symbionts, and I had never seen Duyi use them before. I'd heard that all it took was will: will to control the symbionts inside his body, the symbionts to control the symrock. But the regent was the one who activated all the symrock Moseroth exported, and she would have been highly displeased if she'd known what Duyi was doing at that moment.
    "There," Duyi said after a minute, opening his eyes. "It's activated."
    I stared at the symrock dubiously. Nothing seemed to have happened. "It looks the same."
    "Well, it isn't," he said, grinning. "Finally, something I can do that they can't just upload to your NeuroLogic—eh, Feng?"
    "As you say, young master."
    "It'll hold up the antigrav engine now. Let's go!"
    "It will
what?"
I said, but Duyi was already racing back to the skimmer, and I had to hurry to catch up with him.
    He climbed back in the pilot's seat before I had a chance to stop him—before I'd even determined whether I should be trying to stop him by force. I climbed in beside him, certain that I should, at the very least, stay close, but the Imperative was giving me muddled instructions. On the one hand, I was supposed to protect him at all costs, but on the other, I was supposed to make him happy, not ruin his fun.
    I realized, in a sudden moment of clarity, that I had to choose which aspect of my Imperative to obey. That I
could
choose. And if I could work against part of the Imperative in service of fulfilling another part, wasn't it possible I could learn to work against it entirely?
    Duyi hopped the skimmer forward onto