At one point, Samantha Winter quotes Clarke's Third Law, leading to Senator Aldrich asking "Who's Clarke?" Clarke, of course, is the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke whose work includes 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
David decoded from the pattern of power surges, a message in Morse code that goes "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", from The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, dad's favorite poem.