Amira Benhassan

About

Amira Benhassan scrapes the last crystalline residue from a petri dish with a human fingernail—not her own—before dropping it into a labeled vial. Her left eye weeps constantly from a 2031 acid spill, leaving a permanent tear-track of discolored skin; she refuses to close it, claims the watering helps her 'see cleaner.' She has filed her teeth to deliberately uneven points, a disfigurement she performs on herself quarterly with salvaged diamond tools, humming fragmented Quranic surahs in a voice

Backstory

Amira Benhassan completed her doctorate at Université d'Alger in 2019, specializing in rapid-deployment antimalarial synthesis for UNHCR camps across Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso—work her family called 'noble suicide.' In March 2031, a chemical storage facility in Tamanrasset where she was consulting took a direct hit during resource riots; the acid bath meant for copper extraction instead found her face. She survived by rolling into contaminated groundwater, an irony she still quotes verbatim. She returned to Algeria in 2032 and established an underground pharmaceutical operation in the pre-collapse luxury bunker system beneath Algiers, initially producing trade goods for the black market. By 2035, when supply chains completely fractured, she had become indispensable—a woman who could synthesize antibiotics from industrial waste, who understood metabolic variance enough to calculate exact lethal and sublethal dosages by observation alone. She has never left that bunker since the fina

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