A “Go BUFFALO” misdirected Text Message to a Cricket fan in 2051 - Part 2.
The Corporate Struggles
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
Brief recount from part one:
By the morning of April 1st, 2051, the city of Buffalo, New York, had settled on a comfortable explanation for a series of mysterious events that took place on March 31st—a weird Buffalayer glitch, a harmless fan-mode hiccup, one of those “lol remember when the city broke” moments—but Miguel (a Civil Servant of the City of Buffalo, NY) couldn’t, because his inbox, the logs, and the recurring timestamp 5:37:37 p.m. all insisted that his late-night “Go Buffalo!” algorithm hadn’t just been seen, but heard, understood, and passed through systems that were never meant to talk to each other.
Part 2. The Corporate Struggles
Miguel, a Buffalo civil servant, accidentally set off a chain of events that contributed to a later NorthStar’s collapse when a late-night, misaddressed text message “Go Buffalo!”—meant for a girlfriend was sent instead to the City Mayor. This event activated a deeply embedded algorithm on the platform called Buffalayer, revealing that a harmless AR-Augmented Reality routine he’d created had been quietly woven so thoroughly into the city’s infrastructure that the phrase functioned like a civic wake word, turning casual human enthusiasm into an unintended, citywide response.
Aside from the steamed regard for the routine, Miguel also chose a precise time at 5:37:37 p.m. because it was absurdly specific. The kind of specificity that made a civic code feel safe—bounded, deterministic, boring. BuffaLoGIC, however, treated the timestamp as a reserved value. Then the scheduler accepted it too quickly, as if it had been waiting for the civic detonations of Buffalo’s residents’ enthusiasm.
My phone hummed. I reply, almost immediately: “You did what…?” the Mayor asked.
I closed my eyes. The Mayor’s name—Maureen Mahoney—glared at me from the top of the thread on the HoleSphere of my hand-pod. I tried to reply with dignity.
“Good morning, Mayor Mahoney. To clarify, the Corgi-nods are non-harmful, non-persistent, and aesthetically refined. It will exist for one single event. A nod. A polite nod.”
Three dots of doom. Then: “You need to fix that later, but for now, I need you to review the message from NorthStar Hydration that I will be redirecting to you soon. Please, be careful with them; you know about their lawyers well.”
In my defense, I need to add that it was snowing holograms again, a couple of days before the next MI Buffalo cricket game. The kind that randomly gathers a shimmer of snowflakes until they hit your head and turn into a sparse LED image of a buffalo, which winks, says “Go Buffalo,” and then melts. It was the beginning of January 2051, and Buffalo—my Buffalo, the stubborn, wing-greased capital of not-so-warm weather—had been retrofitted with the Snow Belt Climate Halo apparatus. A chemical and electromagnetic climate ring that could nudge the strong lake-effect squalls into friendly flurries. A modern marvel of engineering built along the shores of Lake Erie, just west of the Buffalo region on the border with Canada.
The Snow Belt Climate Halo machinery operated flawlessly ninety-seven percent of the time. The remaining three percent resulted in heavier snow during winter and an increase in our property tax bills for that year, which was necessary to keep the Climate Halo equipment in good condition. I was at 07:30 AM at the ‘Bean Deluxe’ on Elmwood Avenue, sipping coffee in a climate-controlled space capable of monitoring the day’s indoor allergens index, based on the breath of the parishioners. The system also tracked pollen levels in the Spring. It essentially averaged these levels according to the number of patrons and posted the results on the corner bulletin boards.
That morning, I’d been debugging ‘BuffaLoGIC’ in my government ‘Note-Spectra.’ I was connected to the CCAI-City’s Civic Artificial Intelligence program. This is an incredible software created to oversee weather domes, snowplows, and drones that dropped playoff gifts, among other things. As the Chief Engineer of the ‘Municipal Airspace Systems,’ my mission is to prevent mistaking parades for riots or preventing funeral processions from breaching snow emergency routes. It paid the rent. I could also say “I work for the City” without irony.
As mentioned before, Tatiana and I were not talking. In fact, we hadn’t spoken in three months. That wasn’t an accident. The last time we went out, I had pitched her on using Buffalayer to project blue Bisons along the canal during her upcoming spring Corgi pop-up dance show. This is her second job where she works as a freelancer. She primarily trains Corgis, and one of her specialties is choreographing them in elaborate dog dances (but she has been accepting other small breeds to expand). Then she’d said, “You want your city to upstage my business?” I’d said, “No! I want our city to be your stage.” Then we’d eaten wings and gone cold since September.
Anyhow, when I decided to seek intel about NorthStar's request from the Licensing Division’s Deputy, Tatielle—affectionately “Tati,” I let my guard down inadvertently (again). So, I typed the initials of the Deputy, clicked the first given suggestion in the drop-down box of my email addresses line, and hit send. I was completely unaware I’d emailed the document to my unofficial girlfriend, Tatiana Pires, instead. Worse, I’d added a teasing note: “Looks like your team’s getting bold again ;).”
Tatiana works full-time at NorthStar’s PR-Public Relations division—bright, ambitious, and perpetually stressed. She is always concerned with the interests of the consumers or their products. Not necessarily reflected in the propaganda campaigns for the general public that blur the line between reality and fiction: holographic influencers, deepfake concerts, and synthetic festivals that feel bigger than the city itself. Although she’ll never admit it outright, I suspect her department is tied to agendas far larger than she’s been told.
Mig grinned, brushing off his unease, assuming his request for help was just another offbeat request for Tati. If she doesn’t reply, maybe she’d figure it wasn’t within her jurisdiction—he thought. But the file had gone to Tatiana. Her stomach dropped when it pinged her private feed. Uncomfortably, she opened it mid-toothbrushing, hoping for a joke from Mig—until the header appeared: Redirected from City Hall; Marketing’s Ops Director… Midnight Surge.
Tatiana’s mind raced as she had linked her private and corporate email accounts. Now, if she deleted it, she risked trace audits. Her fingers clenched around the toothbrush. She wasn’t authorized for top marketing documents—no one in PR was. These files were classified, locked, and monitored. Just opening without approval could trigger an alert in NorthStar’s constant monitoring system, which means trouble. She thought about calling Miguel, but her pride got in the way. Besides, if she asked Mig directly, she would have to admit to seeing something she wasn’t supposed to... Panic overwhelmed her.
Act normal, she told herself. Act compliant. She clicked forward, sending the file back to her official NorthStar inbox and CC Mig with a single trembling note: “Received in error—routing improperly.” It seemed harmless. Innocent. A minor bureaucratic correction. But that small act triggered an incident report, as an auto message kickback: “Out of the office, on territory until 10:00 am.” Mig preferred to work on special projects early in the morning without being disturbed. Therefore, he had turned off his message notifications.
A directive from City-net wasn’t supposed to leap to an unauthorized network. Yet it had now entered the company’s environment through an unofficial channel, too. That was a difference the algorithms couldn’t ignore. It indicated the directive had been leaked, smuggled, or even worse—deliberately sabotaged due to the undisclosed linked accounts of Tatiana, who just wanted to be practical. So, the system flagged it. Logged it. And started a chain of automated escalations that neither Tatiana nor Mig could see.
NorthStar’s monitoring system didn’t just flag the file transfer; it annotated it. In “anomaly details,” the report listed a time field that shouldn’t have been in the packet header—an extra stamp no one could explain. 5:37:37 p.m. Tatiana reread it three times, then once more, as if repetition could make it less personal.
Once at City Hall, Mig rubbed his temples and rejoined his team, oblivious to his early morning mishap. At NorthStar HQ, computerized deep-learning automatic auditors stirred, cross-referencing nodes and flagging anomalies. Across town, Tatiana knew she’d left an electronic scar she could never erase. Yet her day at the office went on as usual—tasks completed, schedules kept, the morning’s email pushed aside. Nonetheless, by midnight, the words ‘Midnight Surge’ were no longer limited to a subject line... It had already started to take on a life of its own.
At Buffalo Sparks, the bigger competitor of NorthStar, a cryptic message landed uncannily in Enilda Pireslle’s inbox—Miguel’s son’s mother. No traceable sender. She almost deleted it. She wasn’t supposed to receive encrypted data from City-net—The truth is that no one with his level of authorization would have dared to open it. Wrapped in red security bands that shimmered like shattered glass, it wasn’t meant for her eyes. She was aware that her company’s tech team was quietly monitoring logs constantly, and one wrong click could mean dismissal. Yet curiosity got the best of her. Against her better judgment, Enilda opened the email. As soon as she realized the worth of it, she forwarded it to her supervisor with a bit of a note: “Received in error.”
The Buffalo Sparks executives in the emergency meeting froze once they saw what was displayed on the big screen in front of them. Nobody spoke. The document, inexplicably—with its unmistakable proprietary watermark in the PDF attachments—had somehow escaped or reentered their triple-encrypted security system. According to the attached metadata, it had passed through servers that didn't exist in their network architecture. How had a classified document traveled through City Hall, drifted into the orbit of a personal relationship, and then somehow re-entered their supposedly airtight firewall?
The metadata was worse than the watermark. It showed the document hopping through relay points with null hostnames—machines that, according to their own network map, didn’t exist. Each hop carried the same timing residue, like soot that wouldn’t wash off a glove: 5:37:37. Someone in the room said, very quietly, “That’s not a timestamp. That’s a signature.”
Theories spread rapidly, and even the NorthStar executives received an anonymous tip about what had happened. All executives in both companies were trying to outrun their own fears. Now, some questions arose: Could Mig have been a mole? Was he embedded years earlier to sabotage them from within in covert operations with Enilda? Had Tatiana been compromised? Or was she caught in a hidden scheme of Buffalo Sparks? Moreover, were any of the two rivals already tapping into municipal servers—those outdated public systems that had never truly been secured? Or worse—had an artificial intelligence system, so advanced that it left no trace, already breached them?
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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 3…
Miguel explained his honest mistake. Raj and Zoe were comfortable explaining the hack. Moreover, the news channels were happy to explain the spectacle. Nonetheless, none of them could explain why the system seemed to be waiting—or why that one second kept resurfacing across devices that shouldn’t agree on anything.
Part 3 begins where explanations fail: when Buffalo realizes the glitch isn’t random, the “cheer” isn’t harmless anymore, and the next event won’t be an accident.
