I don't see the relevance of things that carry their own power supply either, and I still disagree that Conway automata and similar software exhibit autonomy.
I did not mention "free will and perfect independence".
You also carry your own power supply...
I could go into more details, but basically you tried to call out some weird use of "autonomous" when I'm using the meaning that's an industry standard. If you mean something else, you'll need to define it. Saying you can't be autonomous under someone's rules brings a serious number of issues to address, before you get to anything AI related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_robot
> An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.
The same idea is used for agents - they're autonomous because they independently choose actions with a specific or vague goal.