Luhmann offers his slip box as a partner in conversation and asks what such a system must be like to surprise its owner. Information arises only when a message is compared against other possibilities, so a collection ordered by topic would settle those possibilities decades in advance. He therefore abandons content-based order for a fixed number that is never changed, which allows branching anywhere: a card numbered 57/12 may continue as 57/13 and be interrupted by 57/12a. Links recorded in both directions solve the problem of storing something twice, while a keyword register and a separate box for works actually read compensate for a memory that cannot hold numbers. After twenty-six years the result behaves like a second memory, without hierarchy or linear structure, in which dense regions form, some notes silt up and vanish, and a query produces combinations never planned. A card unconnected to the network has no quality and is lost.