After being critically injured during an assassination attempt on his father, a teenage Sam Knightsbridge is immersed into a SIM, a therapeutic VR technology that speeds healing or extends life when you're inserted via Neuralink.

SIM environments provide a level of immersion indistinguishable from real life.

For Neuralinked patients, a SIM world is a reality where you level up to heal. Alternately, for those who insert using peripherals, SIMs are the ultimate playground.

But there are two catches if you're Neuralinked in. First, you lose access to all recent real-life memories. Second, you mustn't get ejected from the SIM. That happens if you die in the wrong way while immersed.

So it's simple: Risk drives progress. Progress drives healing. But death is dangerous.

Most Neuralinked patients are never subject to SIM situations where they might die the wrong way.

But Sam's SIM is set in the American Wild West, where gunfights at high noon and getting bushwhacked by outlaws are part of the landscape. And Sam arrives in the SIM with a bounty on his head.

The ruthless cabal that put the hit on Sam's father believes Sam has information that could destroy their plans. The conspirators will stop at nothing to protect those plans. So Sam is being hunted both online and off – in the SIM and in real life.

That's just the beginning of Sam's perilous journey. The challenges that stack against Sam will test his beliefs, his relationships, his skills, and his entire view of the world.

If he survives.

"Gunfighter: Conspiracy" is the first book in a science-fiction / fantasy LitRPG trilogy set in a recreation of the American "Old West." Here, gunfights are a critical means of progressing, Native Americans are an economic powerhouse shaping the world with their charms and talismans, and an amoral organization has decided this fast-growing new environment is ripe for exploitation.

In SIM Space, dying can be either painful …or permanent.