A sky like the dust of ground seashells; underfoot, endless dunes the blue of a storybook sky.
Obtaining a grant for a PhD studying the storage bays of decommissioned virtual reality platforms has not be an easy task, but it was worth the effort.
Even when all the data was supposed to be scrapped, some of it remains.
They started to call it "ghost data".
During power fluctuations they could see mirages of buildings, it was disconcerting at first but not really interesting, because all remarkable ones have been screenshoted to death.
But their data detector could spot fragments of ghost thoughts, like searching for trinkets with a metal detector.
Nearly all were linked to strong emotions, but a few were more mundane: guilds meeting notes, changelogs for mods… They were a refreshment among all the horny roleplay content.
No pattern emerged yet that could explain what data survived the deletion: it could become a large liability for disk providers.
Meanwhile, the PhD candidate was dreaming of opening a new kind of urban exploration tour operator.