Coins only exist at addresses. A transaction takes coins from one address, and sends them to another. If you think these coins still exist, what address do you think they're at?
These were taken from various addresses, and sent nowhere. They aren't in the addresses they came from -- you can check that, the blockchain doesn't lie. They weren't sent to any new address. It's impossible for a new transaction to send them somewhere new, because they don't exist at any address anywhere in the blockchain.
Nothing is impossible. Any new version of paycoin core SW can be programmed to go through blockchain searching for all fees that were ever sent and interpret them belonging to a hardcoded wallet address that represents orion controllers. Imagine this as that the output address is just given later in the paycoin core SW rather than as programmed into the blockchain at the time when the fees were sent in a transaction. Same thing happens, just later.
(1) The coins don't exist at any address. You can't create a transaction that sends them anywhere, because they don't exist at any address that could be an input to the transaction. Anyone who thinks these coins still exist somewhere in the blockchain, go find them in the blockchain and post the address where they can currently be found. But you can't -- they don't exist at any address. Which in blockchain terms means, they don't exist at all.
(2) Nothing is impossible
with a hard fork. They could do a hard fork and create special stakers that receive any number of coins they want to create, but those are *new coins*. They could add up the lost fees and create that many *new* coins. They could just as easily create a billion *new* coins.
The second point there is a very real problem, given the degree of centralization. They could do a hard fork any time they wanted (except for the fact that they have no devs left who could actually do the work). But it has nothing to do with the fees.
If paycoin ever takes off there is going to be a need to implement the fee system and the hard fork for it is going to happen. There is no question about that and the centralization guarantees the hard fork will go through. There are also going to be multiple other hard forks to implement all the other missing features.
The fact that they are currently not in any address is totally immaterial. Pretty soon they are back in circulation in orion controllers wallet address like any other fees ever sent.