The Jane Diary
More properly titled as The Diaries of Jane: Stories of the Third Tiberium War, this work is a collection of short, non-fiction accounts of the human war fought from 2047 to 2048 on their homeworld of Earth. The short stories are separately written, independently verified, and range across both sides of the conflict and all levels of command, from a lowly Brotherhood of Nod militiaman all the way to (apocryphally) the future founder of the Neo-Humanity Directorate. Despite these disparate origins and vast differences in style, the Diary manages to provide a gripping and emotive map of the year-long war that changed everything, according to human historians. It was first compiled in its current form in 2087 by Nicholas Mobius.
The early history of the Jane Diary is somewhat uncertain, but the vast majority of sources claim the individual stories were first seen on forums of the early human extranet (or ‘internet’, to use the human terminology of the time). The first of these stories, according to virtually all sources, is the tale of the eponymous “Jane”, the sergeant of a Global Defense Initiative rifle squad present at the Second Battle of Sarajevo. While the tale does touch base on the overall siege, most of the entry details her reactions amidst its final events and aftermath. Sources claim that the GDI forced its removal from the forum shortly after, but to borrow another human saying, “nothing online ever goes away”, and the story quickly spread like a wildfire.
Despite being less than a century old, the Jane Diary has had a radically significant impact on the human psyche. Some examples include the “Jane Forgotten” agitators of the Interbellum Period and Fourth Tiberium War which, while never officially confirmed, are believed to have been inspired by this tale in particular, as well as the similarly-named “Green Jane” political party, and the Jack Diary, a similar work published by now-Director James Harper during the opening days of the Relay 314 Incident, using strikingly similar imagery to detail the turian bombardments of Shanxi in an effort to raise further support for the war.
(translated synopsis from a xenocollegiate study guide to human literature)