We thought that pushing the blue button would save everyone, but the real world is more complicated than that. It happened one day, many decades ago now: voting booths showed up in every village and every town across the globe. Nobody knows where they came from, just that they all had instructions written on the inside wall. Every person of every age must press either the blue or red button. If the majority of your planet presses blue, everyone loves. However, if the majority of your planet voted red, everyone who pushed the blue button dies. You have 7 days to decide.
Some people thought it was so obvious. If you push the red button, you live no matter what. There was, however, a problem. A certain portion of the population reasoned that, out of 8 billion people, it is virtually guaranteed that somebody voted blue, especially since both the elderly and children had to vote. If a majority push the red button, then all of those innocent people die. If, however, everyone pushed the blue button, then nobody would die. That, they argued, was the best possible outcome.
World leaders each took to their pulpits and pleaded their case to their people, some for blue and others for red. Despite their best efforts, no clear consensus emerged among the nations or their peoples. After the week had elapsed, and everyone had voted, the booths disappeared just as quickly as they had appeared. Soon thereafter, we learned the outcome. Posters appeared in every town announcing that the majority of people pressed the blue button. While these posters didn't say the exact numbers of people who pushed either button, a permanent mark appeared on every human, marking their hands either red or blue based on which button they pressed.
Immediately after the posters went up, there was relief, but this was quickly replaced by division. Blue pushers, feeling vindicated by the outcome and now able to see everyone who voted red, began ridiculing red pushers for their selfishness. It didn't take long before serious divisions began to appear in society, and a blue-handed upper class emerged. They insisted on their moral superiority and refused to do business with red-handers, and as they were the majority, they were able to slowly push red button pushers out of public life. When fights between groups started to become too common, laws were written requiring segregation between the groups for public safety.
It became impossible for red-handers to hold public office, initially because of stigma And later because of new legislation. The blue-pushing majority argued that red-pushers couldn't be trusted with public offices since they only care about themselves and wrote laws to prohibit them from even appearing on the ballet. Police offices and other positions of power followed suit. Over the course of the next decade, those that pushed the red button were forced into a permanent underclass, however a new problem emerged: new children being born weren't there for the vote and did not have the mark. In a society strictly divided into red and blue, this was unacceptable. The government began issuing identification cards to all of these children identifying them as either blue or red handed based on what button their parents pushed. The choice of red or blue, they argued, was really rooted in genetics. People who pressed blue were genetically wired for higher brain function and greater social cohesion, whereas those that pushed red were clearly an inferior genetic caste focused solely on self-preservation. In the case of mixed-breeds, a single drop of red-handed blood was enough to get labelled red-handed.
These days, the red-handed largely live in ghettos far away from any major cities. Some of the people born after the vote and labelled red-handed have taken to forging government documents. It works for some of them, but blue-handed enforcers claim to have scientific ways of proving your colour. Something about the length of your fingers and the shape of your knuckles. I hear that some make it past inspection, but it's a risky proposition nonetheless.
The blue-handed government has begun euthanizing some of the red-handers in these slums. They say that inbreeding among the red-handed has created a generation of predators who are a risk to the fabric of our society. Rumor is they just don't like having to feed a largely unemployable segment of society when budgets are already tight. They push some of the more docile red-handers into manual labour positions where their antisocial genes can't hurt anyone, but a lot of the others just sort of disappear. It must be working though, because the new factories they built have been running 24/7 since they opened, not that I'm a fan of the ash they seem to fill the air with. I'm not really sure what they're making since I don't see anything leaving the factory, but it must be clothing related; that's the only thing that could explain the occasional hair mixed in with the ash. Whatever the case, I'm just glad we found a productive use for the red-handed after everything they did to us.