A Fallout 4 fan noticed that Desdemona from the Railroad crosses out the player's name from the list of living agents immediately after teleporting into the Institute

Usually a hero dies in an RPG behind a loading screen, and the world around them never even notices. Much creepier is the other version, where you're alive, well, and locked inside a suit of power armor, while your allies have already crossed your name off the roster.

That's exactly how one of the most easy-to-miss details in Fallout 4 works. After the Sole Survivor vanishes in a flash from the teleporter built in the basement of the Old North Church, Desdemona walks up to the Railroad's chalkboard and crosses out the agent's codename. No funeral, no eulogy.

Desdemona's logic actually holds up. The molecular relay from the "Tradecraft" quest gets slapped together from stolen and badly copied Institute blueprints, a tube pops loose the moment it fires, and the signal interceptor itself turns into a pile of fried junk after a single use. There's no feedback, no telemetry, and only one piece of evidence that it worked – the person has to walk back through the door on their own two feet.

Then there's the matter of trusting Tinker Tom specifically. A guy who greets new recruits by offering to inject them with a serum against blood drones doesn't exactly have a reputation for reliability, even among his own people. Doctor Carrington can't hold it in and starts shouting across the entire HQ:

THERE'S BATTERY ACID IN THAT SERUM OF YOURS!

There's a second joke baked into that same scene. Players pick their own codename for the chalkboard, and there are exactly six options: Fixer, Professor, Bullseye, Charmer, Whisper, and Wanderer – and that last one only shows up if you let Desdemona choose the name herself. The Wanderer codename is still in the game, but Dion DiMucci's song "The Wanderer" playing on Diamond City Radio got pulled after the 2024 update, when Bethesda reworked the soundtrack for licensing reasons.

The chalk gets wiped away in a second, and a two-hundred-year-old veteran in freshly polished power armor strolls back in the next day like nothing ever happened.