Wow. I think Jonathon Sullivan is my new favorite Escape Pod reader. He not only read the story, he performed it. I loved the accents and the subtle emotions in the character's voices. Great job.
The story itself I thought started out very well. Half way through I was thinking "Why isn't this a Hugo nominee?" But by the end it had fallen, flat, I think, mostly through loss of focus.
The narrator primes us with talk about how viruses seem purposive, clever, devious, so that we have a foreboding feeling that ALAS is more than what it seems. When it was revealed that ALAS controls the behavior of its hosts, I felt suspense, waiting to see just what the virus had in "mind" to do and what it would signify. It seemed like there was this hidden power stalking humanity for some purpose, but what? ALAS was set up to be almost a third character, which would have been fascinating.
But then the focus goes out the window. We are introduced in short order to two new, far more serious viruses, while ALAS is relegated to being a motive for a murder the narrator never gets around to committing. After it's strong introduction, ALAS turns out to be almost irrelevant, and the narrator never ends up doing anything other than exactly what was expected of him.
There is the subtle irony of the narrator's final choices: He ends up doing exactly what ALAS would have compelled him to do, even though he takes pains to avoid infection. We're left with the nice riddle of whether ALAS really beat him or not, but that is scant satisfaction after the intrigue promised by the strong beginning.
What would have been breathtaking, and where I thought the story was actually going, is if Tarp (the Mars virus) and ALAS had actually been related to each other. The purpose of ALAS would have been to get people cooperating so that they could get to Mars, where they would pick up Tarp. Thus, ALAS would actually have been a viral weapon, which would have been quite a nasty twist.