Jesse Randall is a doctor living in an alternate version of 2004 Boston, wracked with poverty and inhumane living conditions for a great portion of its citizens. Society is broken up into two groups: the privileged insured, and the uninsurables. Jesse seeks to help the marginalized uninsurables, who are denied access to adequate healthcare based on genescans, which are unique to each citizen like birth certificates, and show all possible diseases and health issues that person may have in the future given their genetics. In order to help these people and ensure their medical treatment, Jesse goes against his contract at the hospital where he is a resident and ventures into the poorest areas of Boston to treat people outside of hospital sanction. On one such outing, Jesse treats a young girl named Rosamund for appendicitis. Before beginning the procedure, he checks Rosamund's gene chart to see if she is allergic to the antibiotic he intends to use and sees that she is not. He proceeds with the operation and leaves afterwards, promising to return in a few days to check on the girl. When he returns, the Rosamund and her family are nowhere to be seen. Unsure of what has happened, Jesse returns home and continues going to work. Several days later, a sheriff is waiting outside of Jesse's building and serves him court documents saying that Rosamund died from a reaction to the antibiotic, and that her parents are suing him for two million dollars. Jesse realizes that Kenny, the man who took him to Rosamund's house to help and was supposed to be connected to a network of doctors helping uninsurables, was actually a stranger out to frame doctors. He must have produced a false genescan for Rosamund to mislead Jesse and cause him to unintentionally kill Rosamund, leading to the lawsuit. He is fired from his job at the hospital, and with nowhere to go, Jesse moves into a poor neighborhood living in a cheap hotel, where he desperately seeks out new employment at different medical positions across the globe. His life changes after he is in the Public Gardens one day and sees a young boy calling for help for his grandfather who is having a medical emergency. Jesse resuscitates the man. Afterwards, the old man's wife, a woman named Androula Malakasses, pays Jesse ten dollars and deems him the doctor, eventually helping him move into a larger room in a boarding house and providing him with an old dentist's chair to use for patients. He is embraced by the community of uninsurables he finds there, so much so that whenever he leaves for five days to attend his mother's funeral, they are upset that he had left. Jesse shows up at court now less worried about the impact of the lawsuit on his financial and social standing, and instead is preoccupied with thoughts about the patients waiting on him back in his makeshift doctor's office, determined to give them the care they need.