The revolutionary antibiotic Lilacicin brings an end to a catastrophic epidemic, but depleted health care resources and the use of this expensive new medication leave the country's battered medical services in financial ruin. To revitalize the system, the government unveils its innovative universal health care plan, PointCure, and health care giant CelestaCare installs its modern cost-cutting computerized treatment units in hospitals across the nation. This newly designed health care system combination is heralded as the salvation for the future. An imminent physician, Dr. Tom Sullivan, leaves his teaching position at Devan Medical Center to become medical director of CelestaCare's flagship hospital. There he plans to give instruction about humanizing the mechanistic and impersonal automated treatment units. Instead, however, he soon becomes ensnared in a devious plot of politics, economics and murder. Probing the secrets of the chillingly dehumanizing care units, he discovers that the futuristic health care system is intertwined with a bizarre new religious order and encounters a conspiracy that is far more concerned with power and death than with and healing and life.