Touch centers on former reporter Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) and his 11-year-old son, Jake, who has been diagnosed as autistic. Martin's wife died in the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, and he has been struggling to raise Jake since then, moving from job to job while tending to Jake's special needs.
Jake has never spoken a word, but is fascinated by numbers and patterns relating to numbers, spending much of his days writing them down in notebooks or his touch-screen tablet and sometimes using objects (for instance popcorn kernels).