A “Go BUFFALO” misdirected Text Message to a Cricket fan in 2051 - Part 3.
A RECONCILIATION ON CURSED TIME
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 two:
By the time the city of Buffalo’s public administrators admitted that the series of mysterious events on March 31st, 2051, wasn’t a one-off, it was too late to call it a mistake: the same timestamp kept surfacing—on unsigned devices, in isolated feeds, in places with no reason to share a clock—turning Chapter 2’s reassuring hunt for a traceable trigger into Chapter 3’s unsettling realization that the trace led not to a person but to a pattern, and that whatever had once been pressed was now pressing back.
Part 3. A RECONCILIATION ON CURSED TIME
After confidence in the computerized communication systems used by public corporations and government officials was lost, two of the leading companies in the bottled water market began holding endless emergency meetings. Those conferences felt like battlefields, where executives exchanged veiled accusations. Each stopped just short of calling the other a cheater or liar. Their Legal Departments couched their accusations of compliance failures against the Information Security Units.
Later, their compliance department, in turn, blamed HR-Human Resources—for hiring "unfit" staff. Supplier contracts were terminated mid-negotiation, and AI systems were randomly suspending workers for tenuous associations. Once-lively hallways now hummed with whispers of betrayal, broken by slamming doors and storming exits. The cafeteria's murmurs split into islands of suspicion. Even when Francis Norman's mug disappeared, he didn't ask around—he filed a security incident and even considered getting a police report.
By week’s end, NorthStar’s prized launch collapsed. The debut of Midnight Surge—their nanotech-infused energized crystal water—was halted despite glowing billboards, influencer campaigns, and warehouses stocked for release. Fear of espionage spread as rivals seemed to know their marketing plans, rumors churned through the city, and every glitch or whisper felt like infiltration. Shareholders grew restless, and behind closed doors, investors quietly spoke of pulling out.
When Enilda opened Mig’s misrouted email, she didn’t expect it to alter the bottled water war in upstate New York—but it did. Inside was the NorthStar’s entire Midnight Surge campaign: drones dropping samples, AI-powered hologram concerts, neon-drenched skylines. The file, meant for the Buffalo Mayor, exposed how NorthStar weaponized spectacle. Staring at the plans, Enilda trembled—half thrilled, half afraid—finally grasping why her own company, Buffalo Sparks, was losing ground.
She shouldn’t have opened. Security rules had warned her, but nosiness drove her to act. She should have wiped her cache, purged deleted emails, shut down the terminal for the night, and pretended it had never happened. Instead, panic pushed her toward what she believed was a safe move. She sent the file to her supervisor, desperate to hand off the responsibility. But in her haste, her mind misfired, and instead of hitting “Secure Forward,” she sloppily replied and forwarded it—nervousness overwhelmed her.
So, when Enilda admitted her mistake to her managers, she thought her career was over. Maybe even a quiet exit—data leaks this big rarely ended kindly. But the board didn’t fire her. Conversely, they saw an opportunity. One vice president leaned back in his chair, tapping the printed copy of the file on the table. This copy that penetrated the tight security of both companies gives us a legitimate excuse to analyze it under our terms.
“We can’t out-spectacle NorthStar Hydration,” he said, voice grim but calculating. “But we can out-trust them.”
That single line set a pivot operation. Overnight, Buffalo Sparks abandoned its half-hearted attempts to copy flashy campaigns. To the contrary, they launched the ‘Pure Flow’ campaign.
Within days, holographic fountains appeared in city squares, their crystalline arcs of light accompanied by soft music that changed with the weather. Transparent AI kiosks popped up on street corners, dispensing clean water while projecting real-time sourcing data: aquifers, treatment logs, and sustainability stats. Nothing hidden, nothing withheld.
While NorthStar Hydration retreated into paranoid security measures, Buffalo Sparks embraced radical openness. Their silver slogan "Nothing to Hide" transformed the urban landscape—and public sentiment. People lingered at the colleges and universities' fountains, not just drinking but connecting.
Enilda watched how her so-called mistake reconfigured the corporate battlefield from the sidelines. Even though the bottled water war did not end there, it was now being fought with transparency instead of spectacle. In that unexpected transformation, people of the city found they had, at last, a choice.
The outcome of this battle proved that by 2051, marketing wars were no longer fought with posters or simple ads. Corporations needed more than AI-driven holograms, neural-feed advertising, and drone swarms projecting slogans into the sky. Notwithstanding, the local government and cities responsible for coordinating these marketing campaigns, since big corporations had to pay for the use of the airspace, came out with new policies. Additionally, because airspace was only financially manageable up to a certain altitude, competition turned fiercer.
Buffalo Sparks, a sustainable water-tech brand known for transparency, was facing off against NorthStar Hydration, biotech wizards of engineered crystal flavor water, which contains chemical infusions promising to increase energy and memory. Control of the Buffalo student market meant more than sales—it meant dominance over 5G billboards, campus neuro-coffee shops, and AR-augmented reality streams into Canada. Basically, Buffalo Sparks sold authenticity; NorthStar sold spectacle.
Amazingly, in this hyper-digital age of 2051, a human mistake changed the lead in the bottled water race.
This whole drama festered like an infected wound. And just as the scabs of the trauma seemed to form, the civil court hearings exploded over everyone again. The dismissed employees – still in shock from the sense of humiliation – took to living rooms and coffee shops, documents spread over tables, their voices escalating together to weave the pattern of injustice that they had experienced. When the verdicts finally thundered down, compensation checks couldn't wash away the stain of what had been done to them, but still, how they savored the vindication.
Miguel was also called to testify in civil court, as were Tatiana, Enilda, and Tati. NorthStar’s lawyers insisted that there could have been an error in forwarding the message to Tatiana. But the message to Enilda seemed more like an alibi to save the company from financial collapse, given that she was the mother of Miguel's child.
Mig had to explain all his actions in great detail and prove each one with documents and records. However, regarding the accusation that he had saved the job of his son's mother, he—thank God—had all the child support receipts. He had paid more than $400,000 to date. This made it clear to the judge that saving his ex-wife's job did not release him from the remaining payments until his son turned 21, as is the law in the state of New York. That was an irrefutable argument that saved his skin.
The results of all these events, in all their gory detail, are now laid bare for the world to see. Furthermore, NorthStar Hydration tried to claw back some ground in the aftermath. They didn’t just run ads; they aimed to dominate the entire emotional landscape of Buffalo again. At the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2051, the skyline itself seemed taken over—filled with towering, happy emotions provoking holograms. From a distance, they looked like skyscraper-sized light creatures floating above downtown like goddesses. They each chimed in profound, syrupy voices, "Midnight Surge will return energy to your inner self."
Regardless of the new efforts, the first quarter’s numbers were precise. Buffalo Sparks had surpassed NorthStar Hydration in the Northern Region and claimed the “Crown Jewel Territory.” The Midnight Surge launch was already considered a failed experiment. The once invincible image of NorthStar Hydration had completely fallen apart. Some executives resigned or were forced out. NorthStar Hydration stumbled, not defeated but badly wounded.
After the aftermath, Mig kept his job at City Hall, but never escaped the nickname whispered by colleagues who discovered the truth: ‘The Spark.’ It was meant both as praise and ridicule—the man who accidentally ignited an entire marketing war with a careless email forward. For Tatiana, survival came with scars. She emerged from NorthStar Hydration’s purge intact, though suspicion followed her into every meeting, as if she carried invisible contraband loyalties stitched under her office suit.
Enilda, meanwhile, quietly received a promotion to Marketing Regional Systems Strategist. She never told anyone that the great turning point—what history called vision and strategy—was actually the result of a bureaucratic slip, an ex-boyfriend’s reckless send button, and her own clumsy neural reply typed in haste between the sweat of indecision.
Months later, Mig and Tatiana came together again—this time at a community arts festival and not in a university or community board, where Buffalo Sparks was sponsoring the projection of murals, a quiet spot still smelling faintly of ozone from previous hologram battles. Mig stood awkwardly by his new glowing Corgi’s treads installation, trying not to seem overly noticeable, but, of course, Tatina had noticed him; she was never one to be taken off guard.
Mig and Tati were talking like people who had survived a terrible storm and were finally allowed to laugh about it. Still, Miguel noticed his hand-pod’s clock drifting—seconds thinning, then thickening—until it settled on 5:37:37 p.m. The canal water looked darker than it should have under the festival lights, as if the light couldn’t quite commit to it.
“You still sending classified emails to the wrong inbox?” she teased, a half-smile betraying both old affection and old irritations.
Mig's laugh broke the tension, her shoulders visibly relaxing. "Just when I need to reset things between us," he said.
They did not collapse into each other's arms in tears and vows. Instead, they stood there, stunned a little with what was left. The storm had washed away all the pretense—she was no longer clutching every moment in white knuckles, and he had stopped building structures to hide from his own truths. For once, they could admit the truth: both had been part of something incredibly ridiculous, and somehow, that ridiculousness had changed everything for them.
They take back control of their relationship, together again, unofficially, helping on the side with small local ventures that wanted nothing to do with megacorps. Mig was now more involved in Tatiana's Corgi activities than ever. Unlike his other work, these projects ran on nearly no funding or community distributions, rather than through any venture funds. Their interaction was positively wholesome – like colleagues supporting one another instead of trying to show off their own efforts.
They were enjoying a cloudy October afternoon on the canal side of Buffalo, NY, when, at exactly 5:37:37 p.m., Miguel shouted “Go Buffalo” to wake the hologram he had created with a Corgi's mount, meant to surprise Tatiana. However, a skyscraper-sized hologram of NorthStar’s CEO glitched spectacularly in front of them. The stern face dissolved into a toddler’s wail, then into manic laughter. Not from the projector alone—from every speaker pole along the canal, including the ones posted as “offline” after the lawsuits. Tatiana’s eyes flicked to Miguel’s, not accusing, not amused—simply recognizing the pattern they had both tried to call a coincidence.
On Miguel’s display, a system notification appeared with the calm politeness of City Hall: EVENT TRIGGERED — 5:37:37 p.m. Beneath it, a second line blinked into existence, unrequested and ungrammatical: RECEIVED IN ERROR.
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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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