My computer crashed the Sunday before this story was released, so I just now finished listening to it.
If this story falls down anywhere (to me, as a lay-reader with only lay knowledge of blood donation and pathology), it's toward the end. I kept hearing good places where the story should stop, and it kept on going. Of course, it kept going so we could get to the part where the narrator chooses to be altruistic (a great payoff to his general misanthropy toward altruistic people), but toward the end I kept thinking "oh, come on, MORE?" (I've made similar mistakes in some of my short-stories.)
The fact that, at heart, the narrator wasn't a good person is what helped make this story work for me. I find evil people more honest than good ones -- except when they're lying -- because if an evil person is giving you a deathbed confession, and the evil person has admitted to being evil, why lie now? What would it serve? I believed the narrator because he admitted, right out, that he was not a nice person and was really only in it for fame.
I had a feeling that ALAS would turn out to be a gateway plague. Though Brin did not explicitly state it, I think ALAS was an alien lifeform or weapon of some kind, engineered to kill off humanity by bringing it closer together and then mutating. TARP was from Mars -- but was it left there by the creators of ALAS? I don't think ALAS was intelligent as we measure intelligence; I think it was programmed.
There's a line in a Star Trek TNG novel where Worf praises the inventor of the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves cities inhabitable. I'm guessing the creators of ALAS are using it as some sort of similar device/weapon -- they'll send in a crew to get rid of the bodies and then take over our cities and such. I know the narrator said 15% of the population might survive, but 15% of the population is easily subjugated by a more powerful alien race.
The choice of the narrator as a scientist from Texas is an amusing bit of mental culture clash (can't think of the perfect term here). I'm not saying people with that particular accent can't be extremely intelligent scientists, but it's not something often addressed in writing. I think that choice kept the narrator interesting as well, along with his misanthropy.
The reading was good. I like how Sullivan kept it low-key, even when the narrator or other characters were getting worked up, like all this stuff can happen and he's still not going to lose his mind. If it fell down anywhere, it was the end, where the narrator asks ALAS, point-blank, if it knew this was happening. If I had been reading it, I might have interpreted the last sentence ("Did you?") as a simple, resigned statement, infusing it with disappointment and exhaustion. The fact that the narrator got worked up at the very end, just for that last bit, broke it for me slightly.
Overall, I enjoyed the story.