Throughout the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns, and most of the breakaway states, numbers are reckoned using base-8. It works a lot like the familiar Arabic numerals used on Earth, with each successive place increasing in value by a power of 8, and fractions appearing in black boxes to the right of the whole number. Negatives are offset with two "dart marks" pointing toward the number. Here is a depiction of the numbering system: