A “Go BUFFALO” misdirected Text Message to a Cricket fan in 2051
Part 1. The chaos before a cricket game
What about if you inadvertently send an email to the wrong person? Even if it is only to motivate a cricket fan.
In “Marketing Warfare,” AL Ries and Jack Trout (2006) argued that marketing is best viewed as a form of warfare, where companies compete on battlefields outlined by consumers' minds.
by Miguel Reyes-Mariano
Opening note:
Next, we’ll meet Miguel, a public servant in the near-future city of Buffalo, New York, where an algorithm called Buffalayer—an always-on AR (Augmented Reality) in a local government platform meant to be helpful and invisible—quietly sits atop daily life until one late night, a simple cheering routine called “Go Buffalo!” lands in the wrong place. It flips an unseen switch, turning a normal evening into a cheerfully chaotic public glitch-event that feels funny at first… right up until a single stubborn timestamp (5:37:37 p.m.) starts repeating, suggesting the city didn’t just malfunction—It responded in kind to the off events.
Part 1. The chaos before a cricket game
In Buffalo, New York, people would swear the day had begun with a minor, unprovable error—clocks disagreeing by a sliver, as if they’d blinked. A few hand-pods showed 5:37:37 p.m. for a heartbeat too long before correcting themselves. Nobody filed a ticket. Buffalo had learned to live with minor inaccuracies the way old houses live with drafts.
So, on March 31st, 2051, a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man hologram appeared in downtown Buffalo around 5:20 p.m. during the traffic rush hour. As the image suddenly emerged on a side street, a hyper-aware driver heading to the NY-33 panicked, switching his autonomous vehicle to manual control in a fraction of a second before turning left instead of right. The autonomous vehicle next to him, to avoid crashing, had its command computer create a zigzagging path. Another autonomous vehicle turned right at the same intersection, also zigzagging to prevent another accident. During the zigzag maneuvers, other autonomous vehicles joined in, until about 47 cars lined up in different directions, forming a seemingly chaotic conga line dance.
People heading back home experienced a drift of five to seven miles from their usual routes, which caused a two-hour-long delay for traffic to return to normal. Forget about family dinners or those trying to surprise their loved ones by taking them out on Friday’s night or people heading to a doctor’s appointment. The ringing of hand-pods could be heard within a 10-mile radius, as family members desperately tried to locate the drivers, who were unable to access manual mode due to their crash prevention mechanism installed in their autonomous vehicles. Some were lucky enough to deploy the parachute system (in the most expensive models) and leave the car dancing on its own.
The city later argued over the number—47 cars—as if it mattered. What mattered, at least to those who rewatched the drone footage frame by frame, was the rhythm: the pauses, the turns, the way the vehicles corrected themselves at intervals that looked almost… scheduled. One analyst clipped the feed and slowed it down until the corner timestamp surfaced, crisp as a watermark: 5:37:37 p.m. It wasn’t the broadcast clock. It wasn’t anyone’s dashboard clock. It was simply there.
For those caught in the Conga line traffic incident (or dance), this was no laughing matter. However, those watching the incident on WIVB-TV, also known as CBS 4 Buffalo News at 6:00 p.m., found it hilarious. Family and friends were sharing the link so that people could watch the news clips on their hand-pod or connect live to see it. News drones were retransmitting the images from every possible angle. Other news channels also arrived at the scene, suddenly creating a nationwide breaking news story from a local incident. Most viewers later started discussing the possibility of making another similar incident, just for fun.
The weird part wasn’t the laughter; it was the comment sections. People posted screenshots showing the lower-right timestamp stuck at 5:37:37 p.m., no matter when they watched. Others claimed their hand-pods briefly vibrated at precisely that time—no alerts, no calls, just a slight, anxious hum like a warning a device couldn’t quite translate.
At the time, on the west side of the city of Buffalo, Doctor Harry Lim was teaching his marketing class at a brand-new SUNY campus in downtown Buffalo. He was lecturing his students from the third floor of the building, where the windows faced Lake Erie: “As Professor Michael Porter stated in 1996, ‘The essence of strategy [sometimes] is choosing what not to do.’” Now, Professor Lim repeated the line softly, glancing up from his coffee mug just as the skyscraper-sized hologram of NorthStar’s CEO glitched spectacularly outside the windows.
Doctor Lim glanced down at his mug, then at the corner of his lecture display. The campus timekeeper read 5:37:37 p.m. and did not advance. He waited for it to roll over, the way you wait for a stubborn elevator to acknowledge you. The hologram outside sneezed glitter across Lake Erie, and for a moment, it looked less like party glitter and more like ashes.
Meanwhile, the stern face was trying to appear inspiring while uncontrollably sneezing glitter across Lake Erie. “My students did that,” he added quietly. Across the street, Raj high-fived Zoe as they closed their ‘Note-Spectras,’ similar to what was called ‘laptops’ long ago, but without screens. University students have discovered a way to hack billboards using open-source scripts. The viral clip was suddenly replaced by a big Corgi mount that appeared to bark, “Go Buffalo.” These holograms are intended to motivate the Buffalo, New York, Cricket team founded in 2031. It was part of the MI New York (2023) cricket franchise. An American professional Twenty20 cricket team based in New York City to compete in the Major League Cricket tournaments.
NorthStar’s stocks dropped more than twenty percent before trading closed that day. The hacking chaos spilled onto the ground. Drone fleets, designed to distribute free samples of a new drinkable product called ‘Midnight Surge,’ malfunctioned like the City Climate-Halo machine due to Buffalo’s inclement weather. Gusts of lake wind sent them spiraling, and their cargo—metallic cans with glowing tabs—rained down on sidewalks, cars, and the occasional unsuspecting pedestrian. Footage of children happily chasing rolling cans through puddles became indistinguishable from parody ads.
A bystander later told a reporter that one of the cans popped open on impact, and the liquid inside steamed in the cold like breath. Their hand-pod automatically recorded the moment— “for your memories,” the device chirped—and labeled the clip with the wrong time—5:37:37 p.m. The bystander deleted it twice. It kept returning to their archive like an unread message.
Then, the scandals spread out. Footage surfaced of NorthStar Hydration delivery men denouncing the local mom-and-pop corner stores and calling them "shelving traitors" for letting their competitor Buffalo Sparks in their coolers, even a little. One manager, turning red and shaking, said to a deli owner that he was "plotting against the future of beverages." Within hours, hashtags started trending like a civic uprising: #NorthStarHydrationParanoia, #DrinkHonest, #WeBacksBuffaloSparks.
The hashtags weren’t just slogans; they were rallying cries, appearing on T-shirts, spray-painted across abandoned warehouses, and plastered over the hologram projectors NorthStar Hydration had installed.
In contrast, Buffalo Sparks' type of warfare didn't look a whole lot like planned; it appeared to be more like a raucous celebration. Members of extended families loitered about illuminated water kiosks that looked far more like public art than vending machines. The kids were playing tag beneath the lights. At the same time, the grandparents filled their bottles with pleasure and ritual-like satisfaction. Local artists projected murals onto brick walls — giant water springs, portraits of neighborhood elders — all powered by eco-light panels supporting Buffalo Sparks’s clean water campaign.
The contrast was undeniable. While NorthStar Hydration offered a spectacle crafted from the top down, Buffalo Sparks fostered something that felt grassroots, breathing, alive. His guerrilla warfare was sometimes messy, but unmistakably human. Buffalo residents began to joke that the city itself was choosing sides. By month's end, NorthStar Marketing director, Peter Smith, and his teammates packed their belongings in silence. Colleagues who'd once sought his approval now talked about their mistakes. Smith’s NorthStar campaign, worth five hundred million dollars, had turned into Buffalo's meanest pranks on social media. Even a tattooed barista had harassed Peter when he asked him, "Are you one of those water people?" before slowly sliding his latte down the bar.
Something widely unknown is how Miguel’s – a Civil Servant of the City of Buffalo, NY – minor mishap contributed to the fall of NorthStar. Clearly unintentional. He probably won't admit it publicly, but he didn’t mean to text the City Mayor on that Wednesday morning, January 4, 2051. He intended to message Tatiana. That’s how it all began. But let's hear from his own recount of the events.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Tatiana after our last impasse, and wanted to reconcile. So, when one of her old emails appeared beneath a late-night draft of the new advertisement regulations, I unintentionally typed her address into my mail distribution list—Tatiana@—probably thinking that it went to my personal email account. At that moment, I was still mentally rehearsing an excuse to reconnect, which I had practiced in the shower the night before. Thus, I did send her a text: “Go Buffalo!”—in the subject line, since she’s also a fan of the cricket team.
Only I didn’t send it to Tatiana. I sent it to the City Mayor – That was an oversight.
Miguel has created a silly little routine in BuffaLoGIC’s AR-Augmented Reality layer—Buffalayer. It’s harmless. If anyone says ‘Go Buffalo’ within thirty meters of the Canalside main venue, at seven minutes before or after 5:37:37 p.m., a blue Corgi hologram will rise from the water and nod. He just wanted to show they’re appreciated here, too.
However, Mig didn’t fully grasp then how many mouths the city had. “Go Buffalo” wasn’t only a chant; it was a phrase trained into the infrastructure, tucked into permissions and event hooks, the way old superstitions get nailed above doorways. Buffalayer listened with borrowed ears—speaker poles that were supposedly offline, kiosk mics that “only” counted foot traffic, ad projectors that had no business taking requests—and it did what it always did with human warmth: it translated them into a trigger. In the wrong place, at the wrong minute, the words didn’t sound like encouragement at all. They sounded like a knock on something sealed years ago.
The phrase “Go Buffalo” had been sprinkled into sponsorship bundles, civic “engagement” pilots, and Buffalayer demo code so thoroughly that saying it was basically the local version of yelling “Hey Siri,” except with more civic pride and fewer privacy settings. It didn’t matter that he typed it into an email subject line at 2:00 a.m.—some part of the city’s AR stack still heard it as a friendly request, like: hello, yes, I would like one (1) enthusiastic hologram and maybe an avoidable incident, please.
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REFERENCE
MI New York. (2023). MI New York: Official website of the MI New York cricket team. Major League Cricket. Retrieved from https://www.minycricket.com
Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy? Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.
Ries, A., & Trout, J. (2006). Marketing warfare (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
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https://open.substack.com/pub/leuseyer/p/a-go-bills-misdirected-text-message?r=5tphup&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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Do not miss Part 2…
What Buffalo saw that evening on March 31st, 2051, looked like a prank that got out of hand—holograms, glitching timestamps, cars dancing as if they’d rehearsed it. But pranks don’t usually leave the same fingerprint everywhere, and they don’t usually pick a single second—5:37:37 p.m.—and then keep returning to it like a signature.
In Part 2, Miguel’s “harmless” routine stops being a funny footnote and becomes a domino effect because someone else noticed the trigger too… and knew exactly what Buffalo would do if their residents were cheering.
