Relinquishment Clinic

Relinquishment Clinics are facilities present on Cybertron that allows customers to temporarily transfer their spark into a new body-type. Such a procedure only costs... 5,000 shanix?! What a rip off!

IDW Generation 1 continuity
Prior to the Great War, full scale re-engineering was a service only available to the elite Cybertronian classes. As such, the general masses were fixed in their alt-modes and unable to change them. At this time, these clinics were run by commercial enterprises and charged fees as high as 5,000 shanix to make use of a patented Sparkswap Technology to transfer a spark into a vacant bodyshell, using spark extraction equipment and whiteout vacuums. These bodyshells were from donors which allowed clients to experience life in a completely different alt-mode. Ratchet disliked the clinics as he felt that they were a nasty form of body tourism. During the Clampdown, a former member of the Primal Vanguard attacked a Relinquishment Clinic in Apophenia and shot some of the body donors. This event went some way towards stirring up resentment that any lunatic might be outfitted with weapons unquestioningly.

The clinics were one of many facilities used as a cover for the Institute, a sinister government brainwashing facility. Poor robots from the Dead End went in to sell their bodies for money, and came out thinking new thoughts. An Institute facility was discovered by Mechaforensics officers Tumbler and Prowl beneath a clinic staffed by Trepan, when they visited searching for information on Fallout and Streaker, who had sold their bodies to the clinic.

Following the dissolution of the ruling government and the outbreak of the Transformers' war, most clinics ceased operation. As the corrosion of war without end wore on Cybertron's populace, the few remaining clinics began offering a new service for those who wished to escape the conflict but could not leave the planet: assisted suicide. It was while waiting in line to die that Tumbler—now known as "Chromedome"—met Rewind, who had come to the clinic to search for his missing partner Dominus Ambus.