This book made me realize how awesome smugglers are. When I grow up, that's what I want to be.

Apparently, Hardwired was inspired by a story of butter smugglers who used to sneak that delightful dairy product into Belgium during a post-war regime of particularly high taxes. The Belgian police took a dim view of this activity and so the smugglers suped-up their cars and plated them with armor so they could ignore the official bullets. At least one troubadour of their deeds called them panzerboys.

And that is what Hardwired is about, although, the panzers are monster truck hover tanks with gobs of guns and rocket launchers and the border is the broad expanse of the Midwest in a balkanized United States, and the authorities are orbital corporations that drove the Earth to its knees by flinging meteors at it.

There's a lot of politics going on in Hardwired, but it's the spirit of the thing that really carries the day: the smugglers -- panzerboys -- are glorious outlaws who won't bend a knee to any authority and who live by their wit and weapons. Their nerves are hardwired and they run the Line with their panzers:

the mutant creature with turbine lungs and highpressure turbopump heart, crystal implanted in his skull, eyes like lasers, fingers that point missiles, alcohol throbbing through his veins.

Things are always just about to crash down on the panzerboys, the odds are ever against them. It seems like the question in the story is: will the smugglers get stamped out? Or worse: are they just pawns in some bigger game which they do not fathom?

if the third men and panzerboys are just participating in a reshuffling of finances on behalf of the Orbital blocs, then the dream of being the last free Americans on the last free road is a foolish, romantic delusion. And what is Cowboy then? A dupe. A hovercraft clown. Or worse than that, a tool.

But when Cowboy wins, and the 4D chess orbital overlords are suddenly brought into abrupt and splattering contact with brick and mortar, we get a glimpse of the true nature of freedom. There is no change of laws that leads to freedom, no evil cabal can be broken to release freedom across the land -- it only comes from breaking the law.

We weren't running the Line, Cowboy thinks, for the Northeast. Or for the money. That was what the Arkady and the thirdmen never understood, thinking we could be bought, that we would respond to economic pressure. And that's what the Orbitals don't understand, what their crystal world models can't figure. That we'd have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.

This book is one of the best tellings of that adage: "freedom isn't given, its taken." Usually with weaponry, risk, and lots of cunning.

The reality is here in the panzer. Discontent is banished. Action is the thing and All.