Your save data was most likely corrupted and was reverted to a previous version upon restart. This would explain the completely different character. Any more info on the Garbage Bots glitching out? It sounds like the game may have crashed, if not then something strange happened. Thankfully the save system does have a fall-back, but it should tell you when it does that. None of these things should be going on silently, so please do get back to me if they are. :-)
-Cheers