Part Eighty-Nine. The Upset

"So what I'm saying is," Claptrap went on, peering over a ledge into a pit of toxic goo my mom still hasn't told me the makeup of, "there's like... a hierarchy. And where you are depends on how you were made. The parts you're made of. Stuff like that."

I think my mom said something like this once, about how she knows what the Cores are capable of doing. "And it's the uh, it's the same here as on Pandora, 's what you're saying. Right?" my dad asks.

"Oh yeah," Claptrap answered. "Only real difference is the uh... lack of humans thing."

"Are humans usually at the top?" I ask him, and both Dad and Claptrap look at me for a second.

"Well, they... they used to be here. As well," Dad says.

"This is an uh... unusual situation." Claptrap rubs his hand under his optic a little. He does that sometimes, but I'm not sure why. "See, there's actually not a name for what your mom is. The highest tier robot is the administration bot, but she kinda... to call her an administration bot would be an insult. I don't think I've ever even heard of another robot at her level. She's kinda... in a league of her own."

"Isn't she," my dad says fondly, and to keep the conversation on track I say hurriedly, "So are there a lot of administration bots on Pandora?"

"Hell no," Claptrap scoffed. "Humans rarely manufacture those. Too worried they'll lead a robot uprising! Nah. Most of the robots on Pandora are Hyperion drones. That's the lowest level. Above them are bots like me. Steward bots! Used to be tons of 'em'. Tons of Claptraps, specifically. There are other helper bots, made by other companies, but you gotta know where to look. They gotta be kept a secret because they're so valuable."

"But... you just go around doing whatever you want," I say. If he's a helper bot, isn't he super valuable? But he just laughs.

"Care, the overall value of my existence dropped into the negatives the second I said my first sentence."

"But why?" What could he possibly have done in the first second of his existence to make that happen?

"I mean, you could ask, but you're not gonna get an answer. I sure didn't."

"Claptrap," my dad interjects, "if you keep rolling 'long that edge, there, you're gonna fall in. Nobody knows what's uh, what's quite in those pits. 'cept that it probably disintegrates you."

"Ooh!" Claptrap says, continuing to balance himself along the edge of it anyway. "So it's full of human body parts! Just like me."

"What?"

He's joking, right? He's gotta be joking. But before I can ask him he slips off the edge of the panels he was balancing on, and I'm almost concerned when I realise the camera in here is active. So she knows he fell in. He's fine.

"Oh my God!" Dad exclaims, almost jumping over to look into the pit. "Oh my God. Oh, he fell in. Oh no no no no. Oh no. I told him! I told him, Claptrap, get away from there, you're going to fall in, and, and he did! And now he's gone and, and vaporised himself, and ohhhh how'm I gonna tell Gladys? Oh I can't believe he's dead –"

"He's not dead," I interrupt. When Dad turns to look at me he seems pretty upset, but I don't know why he thought my mom would ever just let Claptrap fall into an acid pit and die. "He's right there." I gesture behind me with my lower handle.

"Hi," Claptrap says, waving, and my dad yelps and shudders backwards.

"But – but you fell in! I saw you!"

"Yeah, on purpose. GLaDOS put a portal there. We thought it would be funny."

Dad turns around slowly, to stare in the direction of the active camera.

"GLaDOS."

Ohhhhh boy. I don't think he's ever called her that in my entire life. Claptrap brings his hands together. I guess he knows that's not right either.

"Yes?" my mom says noncommittally.

"Really?" he demands. "You really thought that pretending my best friend was dead was a joke?"

"Whoa whoa whoa," Claptrap says, raising his hands in surrender, "take it easy, Wheats. It was just a joke. It's okay."

"It is not," Dad says emphatically, glowering at the camera. She still hasn't moved it. "It is not because she knows better. You do! You know better!"

"Wheats – "

"Y'know what? I actually don't want to talk t'you. Not gonna do that. I've decided I just want you to know how disappointed I am." And he turns away from the camera and leaves, both me and Claptrap looking after him as the camera returns to neutral position.

"Ah hell," Claptrap says, surprisingly quiet. "That didn't go very well." He turns to look at me. "Was that uh… about something I should know?"

I shrug. "Maybe. I don't really know a whole lot about what went on before I was here. Or… some stuff after that."

Claptrap taps one hand under his optic. "These guys really make it hard sometimes, huh?"

"Yeah," I admit. "But we all work it out. Sometimes you just have to be mad, right?"

"I try not to be," Claptrap says. "Wanna see what your mom's up to?" Right after he says that he shudders a little. "Saying that feels so weird," he mutters to himself.

"Why?" I ask him as we start on our way there. "She doesn't seem like a mom to you?"

"I just can't believe I left for ten years and when I came back GLaDOS was a milf! Never woulda seen that coming!"

"A what?"

"Uhhh… ask your mom. Yeah. Ask her."

I don't know why he can't just tell me himself, but okay. I'll ask her when we get there.

"How long do you think Wheats is gonna be mad for?" Claptrap asks as we move along. I shrug.

"He doesn't usually get mad. And when he does he just goes and hits the wall for a while and then he goes to talk to my mom again."

"So he'll be by in a bit?"

"Probably."

"We really didn't mean to do that," he says, waving me in front of him when we get to Momma's chamber. "We thought it would be funny."

"Oh. It's you two," Momma says. "Was there no one else in the facility for you to pester for a while?"

"Hi Momma!" Before I forget, I say, "Hey, Claptrap said to ask you what a milf was."

Momma just stares at Claptrap for a very long time until he spreads his hands and says, "What? You are!"

"Did you really have to tell my daughter I was a milf, Claptrap?"

"Babe, you know me. I don't think before I talk."

"I'd be surprised if you ever thought at all," Momma says, shaking her core. "Let's just say it's a Claptrap-ism and leave it at that."

"But what does it mean?"

"It means I think your mom is very pretty," Claptrap answers, and when Momma starts staring at him again he holds up his hands. "And that's all! That's all it means. Nothing else implied there."

Well that's obviously not true, but if I'm gonna figure this out it's not gonna be right now. "Oh Momma," I say, before I forget this other question for the millionth time, "I've been meaning to ask you. I'm allowed to pick whoever I want for the secret facility thing, right?"

"What secret facility?" my dad asks, and when I look behind me for a second I can see that he's here too. I guess he decided he did want to talk to her after all. He never does stay mad for very long.

"Yes," she answers. "That's entirely up to you."

"Okay. Well, I've decided. I want to take Claptrap with me."

"Claptrap?"

"What?" Claptrap asks, looking from my mom to me and back again. "What'm I being enlisted for this time?"

"Yeah," I tell her, ignoring him for now. I can talk to him about it later. I gotta know if she thinks this is a good idea first. "I've put a lot of thought into this. I promise."

Momma actually starts a little. "Wait a minute."

"What?" I really thought this through and I'm a little miffed she's not even gonna consider I made a good choice here. She didn't even hear my reasons yet!

"Were you testing him?" Momma asks, sounding delighted, and all I can do for a minute is nod and smile at her. She starts laughing and I have no doubt that she's specifically tagging this situation with 'Caroline's First Test' or something like that. I knew she'd be happy when she figured it out.

"Test?" Claptrap says, looking from one of us to the other. "Uh, just so you know, I don't do too well on tests. So I'm not really the guy to put through one."

"You already passed the test," I tell him.

"What test?"

"The test you already passed," Momma says.

"I didn't even do a test! I swear!"

"Okay, but – but what's this about a secret facility?" Dad asks again. I'm busy talking to my mom, so he's gonna have to wait a minute.

"You did," I say, turning to Claptrap. "That trip I invited you on? That was the test."

"Wait. What?" Claptrap is staring up at my mom with his hands held in front of him. "I thought that was your idea!"

"Oh no," Momma answers. "No. She came up with it. She wanted to do it earlier, but I asked her to wait until I'd finished writing my update because I had a little test of my own to do."

"Wow," Claptrap says, looking down at the floor. "Huh. I never woulda thought of that."

"Yeah, so my mom's got me building a secret facility, just in case," I tell him. "And she told me one other person to trust with the secret. And you passed the test so I picked you."

"You want me to keep a secret?"

"What secret facility?" my dad shouts, and now I'm kinda exasperated since he's interrupting something important.

"If we told you, it wouldn't be a secret. Duh." I shake myself and turn back to my mom.

"Excuse me?" Dad demands, and when I think about it… yeahhhh, maybe I should've said something else. Okay. Yeah. Too far. But before I can say anything he's exclaiming, "'s this how you've got her talking to me now?"

I'm a little confused. She was about to say something. Didn't he hear the white noise coming out of her speakers? And even if she wasn't, why would she be responsible for what I said?

My mom is just looking at him now and not saying anything, and he's going on with, "And now you've got, you've got secret facilities that I don't need to know about but, but he does? And – "

"Hey, wait a minute," Claptrap interrupts. "I do not know anything about this facility thing. I don't know anything about anything! I just found out this second I did some weird test without knowing it! I don't know what they're talking about! I don't even know if they're talking about me! They must mean some other Claptrap who's good at passing tests and keeping secrets, because those are not listed in my specs."

"You would keep a secret for me, wouldn't you, Claptrap?" my mom asks in a soft and cajoling voice, lowering herself to level with him, and he shrinks back a little bit. I gotta admit, that voice is pretty convincing.

"I mean – I'd try to, babe, but – but you know, sometimes I –"

"Hello!" Dad interrupts, shouting down whatever he was about to say, "Are we just, we just forgetting that ev'ryone here's discussing some secret I'm not privy to for some reason? Shouldn't, shouldn't I be aware of this big secret facility that maybe my daughter and my best friend are planning on, are thinking of vanishing to?"

"I didn't even agree yet!" Claptrap protests, backing away from my mom. "I never said I'd do it!"

"Dad, it's a secret," I try to explain. "If we told everybody it wouldn't be a secret anymore."

"Oh! Oh, but you can tell him. The guy who just admitted, just said he can't keep one!" He rounds on Momma now. "And what is this secret facility anyways? Because it sounds like another one of your 'send ev'ryone off to the middle of nowhere' plans! Which I've already asked you multiple, lots of times to stop doing!"

She doesn't even respond to that, just looks away from him, and I have to admit that didn't cross my mind. She wouldn't do that again. Would she?

"Dude. Come on. I didn't ask for this. Remember, I didn't know I was passing a test! I still don't know what the test was!"

"It doesn't matter what the test was. You passed it. That's all. Now I can tell you the secret."

"He doesn't even want to know what it is!" Dad yells.

"Well, yeah I do. Who doesn't want to know a secret? I just want everyone to know that I'm probably gonna tell somebody sooner or later."

"Then what's the point of telling you?"

Claptrap shrugs. "Because I passed the test? Sounds like I kinda earned it."

"You don't even know what the test was! Maybe I'd've been better at passing it! Ever consider that? Maybe I should give the test a go before we go giving you important secrets! That you can't keep!"

"Maybe I'll be able to keep it this time! First time for everything, right?"

Then suddenly everything gets all tingly and I can't see for a second, and after a lot of blinking I realise we're in the hallway outside Momma's chamber. And she's closed it up.

"What just happened?" asks Claptrap.

"I think… I think my mom teleported us out of the room," I answer slowly. I mean, she obviously did, but I'm a little confused. Why did she do this instead of just asking us to leave? Wouldn't that have been easier? I'm so baffled I'm not even mad about it this time.

"Oh, that's great!" Dad fumes, slamming his upper handle into the nearest wall panel. "That's just bloody great. So she's doing that again. Fantastic. Amazing. Can't just deal with things! Can't do that. Gotta bludgeon ev'ryone with the old authority." And off he goes, me and Claptrap staring after him.

"Um… what'd I miss?"

"Usually my mom does this when uh… when she doesn't want to deal with us anymore," I tell him. It makes me think about the other two times, and I don't really want to. Claptrap folds his arms pensively.

"She wasn't really saying anything back there, now that I think about it. We were all just kinda… arguing in her face."

Oh. Oh, he's right. Maybe she thought if she tried to talk she'd just start arguing too. Okay. This was better than her getting angry, because if that happened things would've gone really bad. "That wasn't cool."

Since my mom closed her chamber off we kinda have to go somewhere, so we just head down the hallway and it occurs to me to say, "Hey Claptrap. Uh… you don't have to help me with the secret facility if you don't want to. I guess maybe I should've asked you first. I just wanted to make sure my mom would be okay with it before I did."

"Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm flattered! Guy like me doesn't get asked to do a whole lot. But… I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do that for ya."

"Why not?" I know he's exactly the person I'd need down there.

"Well, Care," Claptrap says, "I gotta tell ya. I've been thinking of going home."

I frown down at him. "But this is your home now. Isn't it?"

He shrugs.

"That's not an answer."

He laughs a little and trails his hand against the wall. "You're a lot like your mom, you know that?"

That's my favourite thing to hear and I'd like him to elaborate, but I gotta keep on track. "Really, Claptrap. Why would you wanna leave?"

"I don't want to. But..." he looks behind him, back toward Momma I guess. "Stuff was fine before I came along. Stuff'll be fine if I leave."

"But we want you to stay."

"I know, and I'm happy about that! Really. I am. But how many more problems am I gonna cause?"

I have to stop because he's really lost me now. "You haven't caused any problems."

"I just did! Back there!" And he waves in the direction of Momma's chamber. I frown and shake myself negatively.

"That wasn't your fault. That was between them. They just gotta fight sometimes. They've always been like that. Sometimes they do nothing but argue."

"I just don't wanna cause any more arguments. They've got a good thing going."

"I don't want you to stay for them," I tell him forcefully. "I don't even want you to stay for her. It's my dad. You gotta stay for him."

"What for?" Claptrap asks, spreading his hands. "He's got her, right? He'll be fine!"

I look at the wall panels for a moment, trying to think. "Um... remember that... that stuff you were saying, about the... robot hierarchy?"

"What about it?"

"Well, it's like that. And Momma's at the top still, and then there's me, and then there's Dad. And under him are all the other Cores and the AI in the facility are at the bottom."

"What's this got to do with anything?"

"I'm getting to it!" He's so impatient. "What it means is that my dad needs you here because you're in the same position as him. The Cores are too low for him and me and Momma are too high. You just... you get him, y'know? It's been so great for him to have a best friend like you. Someone he's equal with."

"You feel like you're above your dad?" Claptrap asks, and I squirm a little.

"I'm starting to."

"Not trying to make you feel bad," Claptrap says, holding his hands up in front of him so that his palms are facing me. "But does he know?"

I look down at the floor. This is something I don't like thinking about. "I dunno. Maybe. I don't - I don't really wanna know."

"I gotcha," Claptrap says. "You really uh... you really think I'm that big of a deal to Wheats?"

"I know you are," I tell him. "He and my mom are best friends too, don't get me wrong, but the thing is... he... he reveres her. And she doesn't think of him that way and she never will. It's not a bad thing and it works for them so whatever," I say hastily, before he starts to think I'm criticizing my parents' relationship. I'm not. I still don't really understand it, but I'm not. "But it means you and him can see eye to eye. In a way they can't. Y'know?"

"I'll think about all this," Claptrap says seriously. "Really."

"And I like you too," I mumble, looking off but not finding anything to conveniently stare at. "If that means anything."

"Aw, kiddo. Course it does. But now you gotta give me a hug."

I never say no to those so I go down enough he can reach me. His hugs are really weird, given the whole arms thing, but I'm getting used to them. They're better than Alyx's, anyway. When he lets go I pull back up towards the ceiling and he backs away from me. "I'm gonna go bug the humans for a while," he says, waving at me. "Catch you later!"

He better mean that.

In a little while my mom tells me I can come back if I want, and I do because we're supposed to be working on stuff. When I get there she's programming. I'm getting better at it, but I'm gonna have to step it up soon because that seems to be a large part of the stuff the Central Core has to do. I like programming but it's got all these annoying little pitfalls. Even my mom gets mad about those sometimes.

"Sooo… does this mean you're not mad anymore?"

"Hm?" she says, not even looking at me.

"You're not mad anymore? Right?"

"Was I mad about something?"

"Yeah?"

She does glance at me now, narrowing her optic. "No, I'm serious. Because I don't remember that."

"You… teleported us all out of the room." I mean, I'd sure like to be able to do that when I'm angry.

"Oh." She goes back to what she was doing. "I wasn't angry. I was just tired of the yelling."

Oh, right. She can't leave this room. Sometimes I forget about that. You'd think that'd be weird, since I've never seen her anywhere else, but no matter where I go I feel like she's around somewhere.

"You never got to tell me," Momma says suddenly. "Why Claptrap?"

Oh, that's right. I shrug. "It doesn't matter. He doesn't wanna do it anyway."

"Of course he does," Momma says, as though I'm being silly. "Regardless, I still want to know why."

She sure does love her answers to that question.

"He knows stuff. Like... outside Aperture stuff. All the other cores have like, fixations on things, and he doesn't. He's interested in… well, anything that moves, sometimes. And he's fun to talk to. And..."

"And?" Momma prompts.

"He stands up to me when he knows I'm wrong," I finish. "I don't know any other robots who will do that. Even Dad doesn't always do that."

Momma nods slowly. "All very good reasons."

I gotta say I'm a little proud to hear that. I was worried she'd think I was trying to steal her boyfriend or something. I don't wanna steal him, but I might need to borrow him. I really hope I'll never have to, though. "How do you know he wants to do it?"

"Because I know him," she answers simply. "Don't worry. He'll come around."

"He might not," I say, because now I gotta tell her about the conversation we had. "He's thinking of going back to Pandora."

"Oh. Right." She rolls her core away from me. "I forgot about that."

"You already knew?"

"No. Something else. But don't worry about it. I'll handle it."

"Handle what?"

"I said don't worry about it," momma tells me, and when her voice sounds like that it's time to drop it. "Now tell me what happened on your trip."

Well, okay. I guess I should probably tell her about that. Since it was a test and all and she probably wants to know exactly how. There's something that's still bugging me, though.

"Momma," I have to ask, "Dad's not right, is he?"

"Hm?"

"This secret facility thing isn't just another one of your 'send everybody away' plans. Right?"

"No," Momma answers, shaking her core. "I told you. It's about the G-Man. If he returns I do not have anything he doesn't already know about. I have a lot of designs for things, but it's more important to use the material we're acquiring for the new facilities."

"Why wouldn't you just move this facility again?"

She looks at the wall for a minute.

"I can't," she says finally. "It's… teleportation is a very delicate process. And I was not at optimum capacity at the time. There were… tiny imperfections made in the calculations. Things that might seem negligible but add up into a sizable error. So what I'm saying is, I didn't get all of it. And the space that I made here to move the facility into is wrong, in infinite small ways. It doesn't fit quite right. It's pushing the structure of the facility out of shape. Because it's so large, the farther down you go, the worse the integrity of the facility becomes. To move it again could possibly cause the integrity to fail entirely. It's better to instead construct a new facility and just move everything to it if there is an emergency."

I listen to all of this very carefully, since the plan does involve me teleporting everybody out of here. It will probably be hard, but it sounds a lot easier than trying to move Aperture. "What if I tried to move it?"

She shakes her core again. "You can't. It requires a degree of integration you will never achieve. And that isn't a bad thing. You'll understand better once you've connected to yours. If you ever have to."

I hope I never have to. But if I do, then… "If I have to then… then I have to leave you here."

She nods, just once.

"And you'll just… be here, but I won't be able to contact you, and –"

"It will be fine." She sounds way too calm for this conversation.

"That's not fine, though!" I almost shout at her. "That's not fine at all!"

"Caroline," Momma says tiredly, "Seriously. There are more important things than dragging this facility all over the country specifically for me. It is staying here, and I am staying here, and if there comes a day when you are forced to leave then so be it. Not to mention it doesn't want to be moved again."

"What?"

"It doesn't want me to move it again," she repeats. "It's tired. It's old. It wants to stay here and do its best to settle in a hole it doesn't quite fit into."

It's gonna take me a minute to wrap my mind around this. "You can feel the whole thing?"

"Most of it," she answers. "Not the very oldest of it, because I never got around to extending the network down that far. Everything built after the decade I was, yes."

But there's so much of it! "What does that feel like?"

She looks away from me a little bit.

"It's… strange," she answers finally. "It's… new. I was always dimly aware of it, but after I moved the facility it became… present. It almost feels like a part of my physical body now. Sometimes it is… a horrible burden. A weight I can do nothing to alleviate. Some days it exhausts me. Others, it is… like being a part of everything in the world, which is…"

She pauses. She seems to be searching the wall panels across from her for the word. I hope she finds it.

"I don't know," she says finally. "It's… peaceful, almost, but not quite. It's like being at home, but at the same time you are your home. I don't know how to explain it."

"And you still have to teach me, Momma," I tell her. "The whole secret facility thing depends on me being able to move everybody out of here. Shouldn't you have done it by now?"

She turns to face me. "I would have," she says, a little too calmly, "if someone worked on her math with a little more enthusiasm."

Oh. I swing my lower handle and wish there was something around to hit with it. "Math is dumb," I mutter. My mom laughs.

"Well, get ready to do a lot of it. You don't have to like it, but you do have to do it right."

"Fine," I groan. "I'll do the stupid math." And we do that until she decides she's going to sleep. Dad still isn't back and Claptrap's disappeared too, so I guess I'll stay here with her. She gets weird when she has to sleep by herself. I don't go to sleep right away, though. I'm gonna see if I can make some headway on this dumb math and surprise her tomorrow. In a minute. Sometimes I just like to sit and listen to her, and right now I wanna do that.

Back when I watched the scientists from Black Mesa fix her core, I didn't really understand what was in there. She's showed me a little bit of how to build cores by now, and I gotta say whoever built her did a terrible job. When Momma builds a core it's all neat and tidy, and everything is only as big or as long as it needs to be. Her motherboard was a mess. When they took the side panel off a whole bunch of cords fell out! They were all tangled together too, like whoever had put it on had just balled them all up and shoved them in there any way they would fit. Her RAM wasn't even in the same spot, or even all the same type. It was the same deal with her processors, and I'm pretty sure they just put them all in there to make the specs look good because I'm not confident humans know how to properly utilise more than one. They didn't even look at the other side, where her hard drives are. It must be even worse. I'm not really sure anymore why Dr Kleiner was so impressed, but I'll get around to asking him one day. There's so much stuffed into her core I'm not sure how she even works.

Well, I kinda do. Claptrap told me that even for a supercomputer she's incredibly intelligent. He said she probably figured out how to make herself work all on her own, and honestly that sounds about right.

She talks in her sleep sometimes, but I didn't understand binary until recently so I never knew what she was saying before. Right now… right now, she's just saying talking to herself, very quietly. I look at the flickering of her optic against the floor panels. I'm a little startled when she actually wakes up. I don't think I've ever seen her do that because of a dream before. I give her a minute for her programming to resume and then I ask, softly, "Are you alright, Momma?"

I expected her to be surprised, a little bit, but she doesn't even seem to hear me. She does look at me, but… dully.

"I'm… fine," she says in an empty voice. "It was just a dream."

It was more than that. I know it was. But I'm not gonna ask right now. She needs to go back to sleep.

"There was no one here. Right?"

"No, Momma," I answer. She must have been dreaming about that man. That's the only thing that makes sense. "He wasn't here."

She moves back down. "All right."

She puts herself to sleep, but I'm gonna wait in case that happens again. She's only been asleep ten minutes before the dreaming starts up and that's when I give up on trying to get this math done. I can't do that with my mom having a hard time right in front of me. I feel like I should wake her up or something. But that she just did herself, and obviously it didn't help. There's not a whole lot you can do to help someone and keep them asleep at the same time. But she always gets annoyed when people wake her up, so I guess… I guess I'll just leave her to it. She probably knows how to handle this kinda stuff by now.

I'll tell Dad about it tomorrow. He'll know what to do.

Author's Note:

The only robot/AI I can think of that can contend with GLaDOS is SHODAN from System Shock 2 but I haven't been able to play that game (for personal reasons; I own it, I just can't play it) but I think at this point in LaaC at least (possibly not as she stands in Portal 2) GLaDOS has surpassed SHODAN. I do not count androids because androids almost always cheat in this regard and make them indistinguishable from humans unless it's convenient for the plot. To the credit of the writers of Portal, GLaDOS and Wheatley actually display a lot of ignorance towards human behaviours/morals/motivations which is in stark comparison to most androids, whose end goal is almost always finding humanity via struggling through morality/ethics. GLaDOS and Wheatley don't know what morality is and they don't care, either. Love it.

Just as clarification, Claptrap can also talk to GLaDOS (or the panels or Surveillance or whoever) whenever he wants just like Carrie and Wheatley can over the wireless. He just tends to do it more often because he finds it easier to have two conversations at once than they do (Wheatley can't do it and Carrie is okay at it but she prefers not to at this point in time)

Borderlands TPS mentions at least twice (if you play as Claptrap) that Claptrap is made of galvanised human body parts which… considering how many people die on Pandora, that makes sense. They don't bury all those bandits, they just… recycle them. Gross. But makes sense.

Also I'm not writing Claptrap out again, this is about something else. We'll get there.