Amidst the lexicon of any language there is a word, so rare, so unique, that it appears in the historic record of the language only once.  It is the Hapax Legomenon.  Of course, during the course of kings and congresses, how could anyone know that the physical record of a civilization's language will break down, deteriorate, crumble, though not as fast as its government, still stone to dust.  What word, amongst the millions spoken, the billions, the trillions?--What word among them would be the word, isolated through history and chance, to remain alone as a remnant of an entire civilization?  What of us?--alive in this "Internet age" with our fanciful concepts of the future and yet with nothing written down on so much as an electromagnetic field on a steel plate.  How rapidly will ours be a lost history after the tide of life has forsaken us and what word will remain that, without context, will be the Hapax Legomenon?  Queef?  Really?  That's your first thought?  Gross.  And yet, perhaps!  Who can know?

After the machines are gone and broken, after the hard drives have skipped and spin no longer, after the wires have lost the battle against entropy, what of us will be left?  No one knows is the truth.  The world goes round and round and it got us here because it kept spinning and spinning and things got thick around the Sun.  What will be left will be up to the ages.  But one man, Dirk Isaway, is not afraid of the dissolution of everything, of the ultimate cold of the universe.  He seeks to find the instances of words, sounds uttered by the long dead.  Imagine syllables uttered by so many of us, so long ago, and yet no memory amongst us remains to even so much as define the sound that came from the throats of the long dead.  Dirk Isaway will find those words in digs and through tight caverns he does not believe he can fit through.  He will find them before all is lost to the challenge.