And I’m pretty sure that it was meant to be a reference to the Wow! signal from the ‘70s. And I think at the end of the final book of the trilogy, a similar thing happens, except this time the virtual constructs of the characters get to go to Centauri via galactic cyberspace.
Surely not everybody's cup of tea but that line is one of the reasons why I like the original audiobook so much (the abridged version read by Gibson himself - not the Audible one). His voice gets distorted on reading the AI's lines to make him sound more eh AI'ish. It's just a silly little filter but it somehow makes the exchange between Case and the AI sound rather terrifying.
